Talk:Mass killings under communist regimes/Archive 52

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For Reference: Aggregator Sources in Rough Chronological Order with Bolded Keywords

Sources by AmateurEditor

1. "Available evidence indicates that perhaps 100 million persons have been destroyed by the Communists; the imperviousness of the Iron and Bamboo curtains prevents a more definitive figure. The Communist system of forced starvation, concentration camps, and slave labor is remarkably similar to that of the Nazis, whose policies claimed approximately six million Jewish victims." [...] "This is an incomplete accounting of Communist genocide. Since the Russian Revolution 61 years ago communism has been responsible for the death of 100 million innocent persons - not including the terrorism inspired by Communists in free countries. The total cost of human suffering and grief is beyond comprehension." - Culbertson, Todd (19 August 1978), Human Cost of World Communism, Human Events Publishing, Inc. 2. "The human cost of communism exceeds most Americans' expectations. The number of people murdered by communist regimes is estimated at between 60 million and 150 million, with the higher figure probably more accurate in light of recent scholarship. The greatest tide of refugees in world history flows from communist states to noncommunist ones: Today it comes from Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Indochina, East Europe, and Nicaragua. (During the entire Vietnam war there was nary a refugee fleeing from Indochina. It was not until communism triumphed that life became so unbearable that people who could withstand decades of war fled to the seas.) Communism invented the concentration camp. Millions have been imprisoned and executed, have worked and starved to death, in these camps. Communist regimes will not permit enterprising Western reporters near these camps, so you don't hear about them on the news. Communist regimes recognize no restraint on their absolute power. From this they establish ideological falsehoods as the standards of right and wrong and the standards by which deviationism is measured; from this stems the systematic denial of all individual human rights. The quality of life always deteriorates under communism: the militarization of society; the destruction of the consumer economy; the rationing of food; the deterioration of housing and insufficient new construction to meet population growth; the destruction of medical care through lack of medicine and medical supplies; the destruction of religion; the destruction and political control of education and culture; the rewriting of history and destruction of monuments to the national heritage; and the assault on family life and parental jurisdiction over children." - Lenczowski, John (6 June 1985), International communism and Nicaragua -- an administration view, The Christian Science Monitor

3. "Few would deny any longer that communism--Marxism-Leninism and its variants--meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. Yet there has been virtually no concentrated statistical work on what this total might be." [...] "For about eight years I have been sifting through thousands of sources trying to determine the extent of democide (genocide and mass murder) in this century. As a result of that effort** I am able to give some conservative figures on what is an unrivaled communist hecatomb, and to compare this to overall world totals." [...] "First, however, I should clarify the term democide. It means for governments what murder means for an individual under municipal law. It is the premeditated killing of a person in cold blood, or causing the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard for their life. Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly conditions that they die in a few years is murder by the state--democide--as would parents letting a child die from malnutrition and exposure be murder. So would government forced labor that kills a person within months or a couple of years be murder. So would government created famines that then are ignored or knowingly aggravated by government action be murder of those who starve to death. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, government massacres, and all genocidal killing be murder. However, judicial executions for crimes that internationally would be considered capital offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in communist show trials), are not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy soldiers in combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of military action against military targets." [...] "Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. Consider that even in spite of the archival statistics and detailed reports of survivors, the best experts still disagree by over 40 percent on the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis. We cannot expect near this accuracy for the victims of communism. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range." - Rummel, Rudolph Joseph (November 1993), How Many did Communist Regimes Murder?, University of Hawaii Political Science Department, archived from the original on 27 August 2018, retrieved 15 September 2018

4. "The Black Book offers us the first attempt to determine, overall, the actual magnitude of what occurred, by systematically detailing Leninism's 'crimes, terror, and repression' from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989. This factual approach puts Communism in what is, after all, its basic human perspective. For it was in truth a 'tragedy of planetary dimensions' (in the French publisher's characterization), with a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million. Either way, the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history. And when this fact began to sink in with the French public, an apparently dry academic work became a publishing sensation, the focus of impassioned political and intellectual debate. The shocking dimensions of the Communist tragedy, however, are hardly news to any serious student of twentieth-century history, at least when the different Leninist regimes are taken individually. The real news is that at this late date the truth should come as such a shock to the public at large." [...] "Thus we have delimited crimes against civilians as the essence of the phenomenon of terror. These crimes tend to fit a recognizable pattern even if the practices vary to some extent by regime. The pattern includes execution by various means, such as firing squads, hanging, drowning, battering, and, in certain cases, gassing, poisoning, or 'car accidents'; destruction of the population by starvation, through man-made famine, the withholding of food, or both; deportation, through which death can occur in transit (either through physical exhaustion or through confinement in an enclosed space), at one's place of residence, or through forced labor (exhaustion, illness, hunger, cold). Periods described as times of 'civil war' are more complex - it is not always easy to distinguish between events caused by fighting between rulers and rebels and events that can be properly described only as a massacre of the civilian population. Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The following rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale and gravity of these crimes:

USSR: 20 million deaths

China: 65 million deaths

Vietnam: 1 million deaths

North Korea: 2 million deaths

Cambodia: 2 million deaths

Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths

Latin America: 150,000 deaths

Africa: 1.7 million deaths

Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths

the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths." [...]

"As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, which resulted from the rural population's resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months. Here, the genocide of a 'class' may well be tantamount to the genocide of a 'race' — the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine causes by Stalin's regime 'is equal to' the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime. Such arguments in no way detract from the unique nature of Auschwitz — the mobilization of leading-edge technological resources and their use in an 'industrial process' involving the construction of an 'extermination factory,' the use of gas, and cremation. However, this argument highlights one particular feature of many Communist regimes — their systematic use of famine as a weapon. The regime aimed to control the total available food supply and, with immense ingenuity, to distribute food purely on the basis of 'merits' and 'demerits' earned by individuals. This policy was a recipe for creating famine on a massive scale. Remember that in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the 1980s, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozambique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines." -Courtois, Stéphane, ed. (1999), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer; Mark Kramer (consulting ed.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2

5. "I distinguish between genocide as the systematic mass murder of people based on ethnoreligious identity, and politicide as the large-scale killing of designated enemies of the state based on socioeconomic or political criteria. Although genocide can be understood to be a species of politicide (but not the converse), in practice, genocidal (i.e., ethnoreligious) killings tap into much deeper historical roots of the human condition. In this distinction, I follow Harff and Gurr 1988, 360." [...] "Turning to Cambodia, the mass killings in that country during Pol Pot's murderous regime are often characterized with other seemingly identical circumstances. Cambodia and Rwanda, for example, are typically treated as genocides that differ little from each other in essential characteristics. However, the victimization rates for the two countries are similar only when treated as proportions of the total country population systematically murdered. Although the mass murders in Cambodia are frequently characterized as genocide, I argue that in fact genocidal activity was only a small proportion of the killing and that the vast majority of Cambodians died in a politicide, substantially different in origin from the genocides we have been examining. The matter of etiology lies at the root of my distinction here, not definitional semantics. If we lump the Cambodian case other instances of systematized mass murder, then the sources of all of them become hopelessly muddled. [...] Essentially, I argue that genocides stem from a primitive identification of the 'collective enemy' in Carl Schmitt's sense, whereas politicides, at least of the Cambodian variety, are attributable to more detailed ideological considerations. Further, the Cambodian case falls under the rubric of state killings, having a particular affinity with earlier practices in the Soviet Union and China. Indeed, an arc of Communist politicide can be traced from the western portions of the Soviet Union to China and on to Cambodia. Not all Communist states participated in extensive politicide, but the particular circumstances of Cambodia in 1975 lent themselves to the commission of systematic mass murder. Because an element of Cambodian state insecurity existed in this period, especially vis-à-vis Vietnam, a genocidal element is found in the killing of non-Khmer peoples such as the Vietnamese, who comprised a small proportion of the total." - Midlarsky, Manus (2005), The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-81545-1

6. Table 2: Communist Mass Killings in the Twentieth Century

Soviet Union (1917-23) ... 250,000-2,500,000

Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1927-45) ... 10,000,000-20,000,000

China (including Tibet) (1949-72) ... 10,000,000-46,000,000

Cambodia (1975-79) ... 1,000,000-2,000,000

Possible cases:

Bulgaria (1944-?) ... 50,000-100,000

East Germany (1945-?) ... 80,000-100,000

Romania (1945-?) ... 60,000-300,000

North Korea (1945-?) ... 400,000-1,500,000

North and South Vietnam (1953-?) ... 80,000-200,000

"Note: All figures in this and subsequent tables are author's estimates based on numerous sources. Episodes are listed under the heading 'possible cases' in this and subsequent tables when the available evidence suggests a mass killing may have occurred, but documentation is insufficient to make a definitive judgement regarding the number of people killed, the intentionality of the killing, or the motives of the perpetrators." [...] "Communist regimes have been responsible for this century's most deadly episodes of mass killing. Estimates of the total number of people killed by communist regimes range as high as 110 million. In this chapter I focus primarily on mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia - history's most murderous communist states. Communist violence in these three states alone may account for between 21 million and 70 million deaths. Mass killings on a smaller scale also appear to have been carried out by communist regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Africa." [...] "Communism has a bloody record, but most regimes that have described themselves as communist or have been described as such by others have not engaged in mass killing. In addition to shedding light on why some communist states have been among the most violent regimes in history, therefore, I also seek to explain why other communist countries have avoided this level of violence." [...] "I argue that radical communist regimes have proven such prodigious killers primarily because the social change they sought to bring about have resulted in the sudden and nearly complete material and political dispossession of millions of people. These regimes practiced social engineering of the highest order. It is the revolutionary desire to bring about the rapid and radical transformation of society that distinguishes radical communist regimes from all other forms of government, including less violent communist regimes and noncommunist, authoritarian governments." - Valentino, Benjamin A. (2005), Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Cornell University Press, ISBN 978-0-801-47273-2

7. "All accounts of 20th-century mass murder include the Communist regimes. Some call their deeds genocide, though I shall not. I discuss the three that caused the most terrible human losses: Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. These saw themselves as belonging to a single socialist family, and all referred to a Marxist tradition of development theory. They murderously cleansed in similar ways, though to different degrees. Later regimes consciously adapted their practices to the perceived successes and failures of earlier ones. The Khmer Rouge used China and the Soviet Union (and Vietnam and North Korea) as reference societies, while China used the Soviet Union. All addressed the same basic problem - how to apply a revolutionary vision of a future industrial society to a present agrarian one. These two dimensions, of time and agrarian backwardness, help account for many of the differences." [...] "Ordinary party members were also ideologically driven, believing that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal. Killings were often popular, the rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production quotas. The pervasive role of the party inside the state also meant that authority structures were not fully institutionalized but factionalized, even chaotic, as revisionists studying the Soviet Union have argued. Both centralized control and mass party factionalism were involved in the killings." [...] "This also made for Plans nurtured by these regimes that differed from those envisioned in my sixth thesis. Much of the Communist organization of killing was more orderly than that of the ethnonationalists. Communists were more statist. But only the Plans that killed the fewest people were fully intended and occurred at early stages of the process. There is no equivalent of the final solution, and the last desperate attempt to achieve goals by mass murder after all other Plans have failed. The greatest Communist death rates were not intended but resulted from gigantic policy mistakes worsened by factionalism, and also somewhat by callous or revengeful views of the victims. But - with the Khmer Rouge as a borderline case - no Communist regime contemplated genocide. This is the biggest difference between Communist and ethnic killers: Communists caused mass deaths mainly through disastrous policy mistakes; ethnonationalists killed more deliberately." - Mann, Michael (2005), The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-53854-1

8. "Mann thus establishes a sort of parallel between racial enemies and class enemies, thereby contributing to the debates on comparisons between Nazism and communism. This theory has also been developed by some French historians such as Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism: they view class genocide as the equivalent to racial genocide. Mann however refuses to use the term 'genocide' to describe the crimes committed under communism. He prefers the terms 'fratricide' and 'classicide', a word he coined to refer to intentional mass killings of entire social classes." [...] "'Classicide', in counterpoint to genocide, has a certain appeal, but it doesn't convey the fact that communist regimes, beyond their intention of destroying 'classes' - a difficult notion to grasp in itself (what exactly is a 'kulak'?) - end up making political suspicion a rule of government: even within the Party (and perhaps even mainly within the Party). The notion of 'fratricide' is probably more appropriate in this regard. That of 'politicide', which Ted Gurr and Barbara Harff suggest, remains the most intelligent, although it implies by contrast that 'genocide' is not 'political', which is debatable. These authors in effect explain that the aim of politicide is to impose total political domination over a group or a government. Its victims are defined by their position in the social hierarchy or their political opposition to the regime or this dominant group. Such an approach applies well to the political violence of communist powers and more particularly to Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. The French historian Henri Locard in fact emphasises this, identifying with Gurr and Harff's approach in his work on Cambodia. However, the term 'politicide' has little currency among some researchers because it has no legal validity in international law. That is one reason why Jean-Louis Margolin tends to recognise what happened in Cambodia as 'genocide' because, as he points out, to speak of 'politicide' amounts to considering Pol Pot's crimes as less grave than those of Hitler. Again, the weight of justice interferes in the debate about concepts that, once again, argue strongly in favour of using the word genocide. But those so concerned about the issue of legal sanctions should also take into account another legal concept that is just as powerful, and better established: that of crime against humanity. In fact, legal scholars such as Antoine Garapon and David Boyle believe that the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge is much more appropriately categorised under the heading of crime against humanity, even if genocidal tendencies can be identified, particularly against the Muslim minority. This accusation is just as serious as that of genocide (the latter moreover being sometimes considered as a subcategory of the former) and should thus be subject to equally severe sentences. I quite agree with these legal scholars, believing that the notion of 'crime against humanity' is generally better suited to the violence perpetrated by communist regimes, a viewpoint shared by Michael Mann." [...] "Dynamics of destruction/subjugation were also developed systematically by twentieth-century communist regimes, but against a very different domestic political background. The destruction of the very foundations of the former society (and consequently the men and women who embodied it) reveals the determination of the ruling elites to build a new one at all costs. The ideological conviction of leaders promoting such a political scheme is thus decisive. Nevertheless, it would be far too simplistic an interpretation to assume that the sole purpose of inflicting these various forms of violence on civilians could only aim at instilling a climate of terror in this 'new society'. In fact, they are part of a broader whole, i.e. the spectrum of social engineering techniques implememted in order to transform a society completely. There can be no doubt that it is this utopia of a classless society which drives that kind of revolutionary project. The plan for political and social reshaping will thus logically claim victims in all strata of society. And through this process, communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political imaginaire." - Semelin, Jacques (2009), Jaffrelot, Christophe (ed.), Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies, translated by Cynthia Schoch, New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-14283-0

9. "Our term, mass killing, is used by Valentino (2004: 10), who aptly defines it as 'the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants'. The word 'noncombatants' distinguishes mass killing from battle-deaths in war, which occur as combatants fight against each other. The 'massive number' he selects as the threshold to mass killing is 'at least fifty thousand intentional deaths over the course of five or fewer years' (Valentino, 2004: 11-12), which of course averages to at least 10,000 killed per year." [...] "One reason for selecting these thresholds of 10,000 and 1,000 deaths per year is that we find that in the Harff data on geno-politicide, which are one of our key datasets, there are many cases of over 10,000 killed per year, but also some in which between 1,000 and 10,000 are killed per year. Therefore, analyzing at a 1,000-death threshold (as well as the 10,000 threshold) insures the inclusion of all the Harff cases. Valentino chooses 50,000 over five years as 'to some extent arbitrary', but a 'relatively high threshold' to create high confidence that mass killing did occur and was deliberate, 'given the generally poor quality of the data available on civilian fatalities' (Valentino, 2004: 12). We believe that our similar results, when we lower the threshold to 1,000 killed per year, are an indication that the data in Harff and in Rummel remain reliable down even one power of ten below Valentino's 'relatively high' selected threshold, and we hope that, in that sense, our results can be seen as a friendly amendment to his work, and that they basically lend confidence, based on empirical statistical backing, for the conceptual direction which he elected to take." [...] "Within that constant research design, we then showed that the differences were not due to threshold either (over 10,000 killed per year; over 1,000; or over 1). The only remaining difference is the measure of mass killing itself — democide vs. geno-politicide. We have further shown that (although the onset years vary from Harff to Rummel), when one looks at which sovereign states were involved (and the approximate onset year), the geno politicide data is basically a proper subset of the democide data (as one would expect by the addition of the need to show specific intent in geno-politicide). It would therefore appear (assuming for the moment that there are not any big measurement biases) that autocratic regimes, especially communist, are prone to mass killing generically, but not so strongly inclined (i.e. not statistically significantly inclined) toward geno-politicide." - Wayman, Frank W.; Tago, Atsushi (January 2010), "Explaining the onset of mass killing, 1949–87", Journal of Peace Research Online, Sage Publications, Ltd., 47 (1): 3–13, doi:10.1177/0022343309342944, JSTOR 25654524, S2CID 145155872

10. "The modern search for a perfect, utopian society, whether racially or ideologically pure is very similar to the much older striving for a religiously pure society free of all polluting elements, and these are, in turn, similar to that other modern utopian notion - class purity. Dread of political and economic pollution by the survival of antagonistic classes has been for the most extreme communist leaders what fear of racial pollution was for Hitler. There, also, material explanations fail to address the extent of the killings, gruesome tortures, fantastic trails, and attempts to wipe out whole categories of people that occurred in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The revolutionary thinkers who formed and led communist regimes were not just ordinary intellectuals. They had to be fanatics in the true sense of that word. They were so certain of their ideas that no evidence to the contrary could change their minds. Those who came to doubt the rightness of their ways were eliminated, or never achieved power. The element of religious certitude found in prophetic movements was as important as their Marxist science in sustaining the notion that their vision of socialism could be made to work. This justified the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore, if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies, foreign spies and saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the forces of reaction. The logic of the situation in times of crisis then demanded that these 'bad elements' (as they were called in Maoist China) be killed, deported, or relegated to a permanently inferior status. That is very close to saying that the community of God, or the racially pure volksgemeinschaft could only be guaranteed if the corrupting elements within it were eliminated (Courtois et al. 1999)." - Chirot, Daniel; McCauley, Clark (2010), Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-1-400-83485-3

11. "The story that emerges from the exercise is edifying. It reveals that the conditions for the Red Holocaust were rooted in Stalin's, Kim's, Mao's, Ho's and Pol Pot's siege-mobilized terror-command economic systems, not in Marx's utopian vision or other pragmatic communist transition mechanisms. Terror-command was chosen among other reasons because of legitimate fears about the long-term viability of terror-free command, and the ideological risks of market communism. The internal contradictions of communism confronted leaders with a predicament that could only have been efficiently resolved by acknowledging communism's inferiority and changing course. Denial offered two unhappy options: one bloody, the other dreary, and history records that more often than not, communist rulers chose the worst option. Tens of millions were killed in vain; a testament to the triumph of ruthless hope over dispassionate reason that proved more durable than Hitler's and Hirohito's racism. These findings are likely to withstand the test of time, but are only a beginning, opening up a vast new field for scientific inquiry as scholars gradually gain access to archives in North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia." [...] "The Red Holocaust could be defined to include all murders (judicially sanctioned terror-executions), criminal manslaughter (lethal forced labor and ethnic cleansing) and felonious negligent homicide (terror-starvation) incurred from insurrectionary actions and civil wars prior to state seizure, and all subsequent felonious state killings. This treatise, however, limits the Red Holocaust death toll to peacetime state killings, even if communists were responsible for political assassinations, insurrections and civil wars before achieving power, in order to highlight the causal significance of communist economic systems. It also excludes deaths attributable to wartime hostilities after states were founded. As a matter of accounting, the convention excludes Soviet killings before 1929, during World War II (1940-45) and in Germany, occupied Europe, North Korea, Manchuria and the Kuril Islands (1946-53). Killings in China before October 1949 are similarly excluded, as are those in Indochina before 1954. Soviet slaughter of nobles, kulaks, capitalist and the bourgeoisie during War Communism are part of the excluded wartime group, but killings of similar social categories in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia after their civil wars in the process of Communist consolidation are included. The summary casualty statistics reported in Table 11.1 conform with this definition and in principle only reflect excess deaths, excluding natural mortality. It provides a comprehensive picture of discretionary communist killings unobscured by wartime exigencies. Others desiring a broader body count to assess the fullest extent of communist carnage can easily supplement the estimates provided here from standard sources." [...] "We now know as well beyond a reasonable doubt that there were more than 13 million Red Holocaust victims 1929–53, and this figure could rise above 20 million." - Rosefielde, Steven (2010), Red Holocaust, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-77757-5

12. "Because of Lenin - through mass executions during and after civil war, through massive deaths in the Gulag initiated under Lenin's direction (and powerfully documented in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago), and through mass famines induced by ruthless indifference (with Lenin callously dismissing as unimportant the deaths of 'the half-savage, stupid, difficult people of the Russian villages') - it can be estimated that between 6-8,000,000 people perished." That number subsequently was more or less tripled by Stalin, who caused, it has been conservatively estimated, the deaths of no less than 20,000,000 people, and perhaps even upward of 25,000,000." [...] Though the precise figures for Stalin's toll will never be available, it is unlikely that the range of 20-25,000,000 victims is an exaggeration. Census statistics also indicate that additionally the biological depletion of the Soviet population during Stalin's reign was even higher. The estimated number of killings cited above, in any case, accounts for Stalin's direct genocide. Demographic depletion - because of reduced birthrates, loss of offspring because of higher infant mortality, births that did not take place because of imprisonment of a would-be parent, etc. - certainly had to be in excess of even the enormous toll directly attributable to Stalin personally." [...] "Accounting for the human losses in China during the most violent phases of the communist experiment is an even more difficult task. Unlike the exposure of Stalin's crimes in the Soviet Union (and the much delayed and the still somewhat reticent exposure of Lenin's crimes), the Chinese regime persists in regarding the Maoist phase as relatively sacrosanct, with its killings justified but with their scale kept secret. The only exception is the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, from which the current Chinese rulers suffered directly. For this phase of internal violence some estimates have surfaced, and they suggest deaths on the scale of 1-2,000,000. For the earlier phases, notably the 1950s, there have been broad estimates of as many as several million executed as 'enemies of the people' - mostly landlords and richer bourgeoisie as well as former Kuomintang officials and officers. In addition, the figure of up to 27,000,000 peasants who perished as a consequence of the forcible collectivization has often been cited. Given the size of the Chinese population, and the indifference to human life of the current regime, the estimate of about 29,000,000 as the human cost of the communist era is in all probability on the low side, especially as it does not take into account the net loss to China's population because of the demographic impact of such mass killings. This ghastly ledger would not be complete without some accounting of the price in human lives paid for the attempts to construct communist utopias in Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba. It is a safe estimate that these consumed at least 3,000,000 victims, with Cambodia under Pol Pot alone accounting for one-third. Thus the total might actually be higher. In brief, the failed effort to build communism in the twentieth century consumed the lives of almost 60,000,000 human beings, making communism the most costly human failure in all of history." - Brzezinski, Zbigniew (2010), Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century, Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-1-439-14380-3

13. "For those who prefer totals broken down by country, here are reasonable estimates for the number of people who died under Communist regimes from execution, labor camps, famine, ethnic cleansing, and desperate flight in leaky boats:

• China: 40,000,000
• Soviet Union: 20,000,000
• North Korea: 3,000,000
• Ethiopia: 2,000,000
• Cambodia: 1,700,000
• Vietnam: 365,000 (after 1975)
• Yugoslavia: 175,000
• East Germany: 100,000
• Romania: 100,000
• North Vietnam: 50,000 (internally, 1954-75)
• Cuba: 50,000
• Mongolia: 35,000
• Poland: 30,000
• Bulgaria: 20,000
• Czechoslovakia: 11,000
• Albania: 5,000
• Hungary: 5,000
• Rough Total: 70 million

(This rough total doesn't include the 20 million killed in the civil wars that brought Communists into power, or the 11 million who died in the proxy wars of the Cold War. Both sides probably share the blame for these to a certain extent. These two categories overlap somewhat, so once the duplicates are weeded out, it seems that some 26 million people died in Communist-inspired wars.)" - White, Matthew (2011), Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 978-0-393-08192-3

14. "If we look at mass killing since 1945 perpetrated by non-democratic states outside the context of war, we find two basic types of case. The first involved revolutionary communist governments implementing their plans for radical transformation. Over one-third of all the relevant cases (14 of the 38 episodes) were perpetrated by communist governments. According to Benjamin Valentino, communist governments were so exceptionally violent because the social transformations they attempted to engineer required the material dispossession of vast numbers of people. The most radical of these regimes, in China, Cambodia, and North Korea, attempted to completely reorient society, eradicating traditional patterns of life and forcibly imposing a new and alien way of life. Communist objectives, Valentino points out, could only be achieved with violence and the scale of the transformation dictated a massive amount of violence. Of course, communist revolutions also elicited resistance, prompting the state into massive and bloody crackdowns and generating a culture of paranoia which led many regimes to periodically purge their own ranks (China's 'cultural revolution' being a good example). In communist ideology, the good of the party was associated with the national interest, individuals were divested of rights and subordinated to the will of the party leadership, and entire groups (e.g. kulaks in the Soviet Union, merchants and intellectuals in Cambodia) were deemed 'class enemies' that could be eradicated en masse to protect the revolution." [...] "Between 1945 and 1989, communist regimes massacred literally millions of civilians. A conservative estimate puts the total number of civilians deliberately killed by communists after the Second World War between 6.7 million and 15.5 million people, with the true figure probably much higher. Communist governments in China and Cambodia embarked on programs of radical social transformation and killed, tortured or allowed to starve whole groups that were thought hostile to change or simply unworthy of life. In the Soviet Union, Albania, North Korea, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and China, communist governments used sometimes massive levels of indiscriminate violence against civilians to deter and defeat actual and imagined opponents and/or exact revenge for the Second World War. Where communist governments were violently challenged, they exhibited little concern for civilian immunity, as evidenced by the Soviet assaults on Hungary and Afghanistan and North Korea’s conduct in the Korean War. Finally, communism spawned violent non-state actors, such as the Red Brigades and Bader-Meinhoffer gang in Europe, Shining Path in Peru, and FARC in Colombia, all of which deliberately targeted non-combatants." [...] "But it is not simply the number of victims that distinguishes communist from non-communist mass killing in the Cold War—though that in itself is important to acknowledge. The most important difference for our purposes lies in the fact that amongst the perpetrators and their supporters there was very little recognition that the deliberate extermination of large numbers of civilians might be morally problematic, let alone prohibited. Where there was criticism of this litany of mass murder, it almost always came from outside the communist world. The principal reason for the failure of civilian immunity to moderate the behavior of communist governments during the Cold War was the persistence and spread of communism’s ideology of selective extermination, and its general acceptance within the communist world as a legitimator of mass killing. As I argued earlier, this 'anti-civilian ideology' identifies whole groups as being outside the protection of noncombatant immunity and therefore liable for legitimate extermination. The basic communist variant of this ideology was first developed and applied by Stalin and held that certain socioeconomic or national groups or political attitudes were anti-communist and that group members were 'enemies of the people' who could be legitimately destroyed. Although each of the communist regimes that massacred large numbers of civilians during the Cold War developed their own distinctive account of selective extermination, they all shared the basic idea that their targets—identified as whole groups—had by their identity, actions, or thoughts, placed themselves outside legal or moral protection.85 Thus, in contrast to most Western or anti-communist perpetrators of mass atrocities during the Cold War, communist perpetrators tended to argue that their victims were 'criminals' or 'enemies of the people' and therefore beyond the protection of civilian immunity." - Bellamy, Alex J. (2012), "Massacres and Morality: Mass Killing in an Age of Civilian Immunity" (PDF), Human Rights Quarterly, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 34 (4): 927‒958, doi:10.1353/hrq.2012.0066, JSTOR 23352235, S2CID 86858244

15. "In these contexts, democratic impulses were snuffed out, and foundations were made for the centralization of power in the hands of Stalin, who in turn proclaimed the new nationalist doctrine of 'socialism in one country'. Thereafter, nationalist ideas were at the heart of many mass killings by Communist states, both in genocide and in war. As Stalinist parties seized power in Asia and the Balkans after 1945, they each proclaimed their own national ideology. Each 'great leader' claimed to represent his fatherland, and many were prepared to kill extensively in the leader's name. After this, nationalist militarism became the model for revolutionary movements across the Third World. Whatever other ideological elements and alliances the insurgent forces claimed, their killing was invariably in the name of national liberation. The 'killing fields' of Cambodia (episode VII) represented the nadir of this kind of nationalist Communism. In the former Soviet and Yugoslav areas after 1989, many former Communist elites reinvented themselves as ethnic nationalists. In some cases, they launched genocidal wars in the name of their new creed, to renew the foundations of their power. Nationalism made democratization a sick joke in war zones - the incentive to manufacture ethnically homogenous electorates became one of the driving forces of expulsion and slaughter (episode VIII)." - Shaw, Martin (2015), War and Genocide: Organised Killing in Modern Society (reprint ed.), John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-0-745-69752-9

16. "A brief survey returns the following high and low estimates for the number of people who died at the hand of communist regimes:

China: 29,000,000 (Brzezinski) to 78,860,000 (Li)

USSR: 7,000,000 (Tolz) to 69,500,000 (Panin)

North Korea: 1,600,000 (Rummel, Lethal Politics; figure for killings) to 3,500,000 (Hwang Jang-Yop, cited in AFP; figure for famine)

Cambodia: 740,000 (Vickery) to 3,300,000 (Math Ly, cited in AP)

Africa: 1,700,000 (Black Book) to 2,000,000 (Fitzgerald; Ethiopia only)

Afghanistan: 670,000 (Zucchino) to 2,000,000 (Katz)

Eastern Europe: 1,000,000

Vietnam: 1,000,000 (Black Book) to 1,670,000 (Rummel, Death by Government)

Latin America: 150,000

International Movements not in power: 10,000

The combined range based on the estimates considered, which derive from scholarly works, works of journalism, memoirs, and government-provided figures, spans from 42,870,000 to 161,990,000. While reasonable people will disagree in good faith on where the true number happens to lie, any number within this range ought to provoke horror and condemnation. And as previously mentioned, these figures estimate only the number of people who perished, not those who were merely tortured, maimed, imprisoned, relocated, expropriated, impoverished, or bereaved. These many millions are victims of communism too. The commonly cited figure of the deaths caused by communist regimes, 100 million, falls midway through this range of estimates. As scholars continue to research the history of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and other communist regimes, and as they gain access to previously inaccessible records, the scale of communist crimes will gradually come into even sharper focus.

Works Consulted

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010.

Courtois, Stéphane, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Marolin. The Black Book of Communism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

'Cambodians Recall Massacres.' AP, May 22, 1987.

Fitzgerald, Mary Anne. 'Tyrant for the taking.' The Times (London), April 20, 1991.

Katz, Lee Michael. 'Afghanistan’s President is Ousted.' USA Today, April 17, 1992.

Li, Cheng-Chung. 'The Question of Human Rights on China Mainland. Republic of China: World Anti-Communist League', 1979.

Panin, Dimitri. Translated by John Moore. The Notebooks of Sologdin. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Rummel, R. J. Death by Government. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994.

Rummel, R. J. Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990.

Tolz, Vera. 'Ministry of Security Official Gives New Figures for Stalin's Victims.' Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report. May 1, 1992. (The figure of seven million direct executions under Stalin, given by a member of the security services heading a commission for rehabilitation, may be taken as an absolute baseline figure to which should be added the many deaths suffered by labor camp inmates and the deaths preceding and following the Stalin period.)

'Top defector says famine has killed over three million Koreans.' Agence France Presse, March 13, 1999.

Vickery, Michael. Cambodia 1975 – 1982. Boston: South End Press, 1984.

Zucchino, David. 'The Americans ... They Just Drop Their Bombs and Leave.' Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2002.

Matthew White's website Necrometrics provides a useful compilation of scholarly estimates of the death toll of major historical events." - Dissident (28 July 2016), Victims by the Numbers, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, archived from the original on 14 March 2018, retrieved 19 August 2018

17. "The relationship between human rights and communism in both theory and practice has often been in tension. In the ideational realm, Karl Marx famously dismissed the rights of man as a bourgeois fantasy that masked the systemic inequality of the capitalist system. 'None of the supposed rights of man,' Marx wrote, 'go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society ... withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.' Rights and liberties in bourgeois society, he argued, provided only an illusory unity behind which social conflict and inequalities deepened. Rhetorically, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and most of the rest of the communist world followed Marx's lead. As the Chinese argued in 1961, 'the 'human rights' referred to by bourgeois international law and the 'human rights' it intends to protect are the rights of the bourgeoisie to enslave and to oppress the labouring people ... [and] provide pretexts for imperialist opposition to socialist and nationalist countries. They are reactionary from head to toe.' Rejecting Enlightenment-era inalienable individual political and civil rights, communist states instead championed collective economic and social rights. The Soviets grew fond of annually celebrating International Human Rights Day, to mark the anniversary of the 1948 adoption of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by offering lectures to its citizens that contrasted the promotion of socialist rights in the Soviet Union with their violations in the capitalist world. And yet state-orchestrated mass killings and what have come to be called gross violations of human rights were at times almost commonplace in communist-led states. Between 1933 and 1945, more than a million people died in the Soviet Gulag system and likely at least 6 million more in politically induced Soviet famines, Stalin's mass executions in the great terror and in what Timothy Snyder has termed the 'bloodlands' of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and the western edges of Russia. In Mao's China, as many as 45 million Chinese died of famine during the Great Leap Forward, while some 2.5 million were killed or tortured to death. During the Cultural Revolution, between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed. In Pol Pot's Cambodia, 200,000 were executed and between 1.4 million and 2.2 million of the country's 7 million people died of disease and starvation. If the precise numbers have always been, and continue to be, in dispute, their order of magnitude is not.

In fact the entanglements between human rights and communism in the twentieth century were more ambiguous than the chasm between ideology and these staggering numbers would suggest. The meanings of human rights themselves remained unstable over much of the second half of the century, as did the actors in the communist world who engaged with them. What promises of global human rights like those contained in the Universal Declaration might portend and the very claims about what constituted human rights were not fixed. Nor was the significance of human rights for the making of international politics or local lives as they were lived on the ground at all clear. The relationship between human rights and international communism after 1945 became fluid. In the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union played an active role in the creation of a global human rights order in the drafting of the Universal Declaration and the Genocide Convention and participating in the Nuremberg Trials. With the coming of decolonization, the Soviets and the Chinese would also help to open out the meanings of international human rights toward the rights of postcolonial self-determination and development. But human rights in the communist world largely became a polemical state posture within the broader Cold War ideological struggle. Indeed, the international project of human rights itself became a muted practice by the 1950s." - Bradley, Mark Philip (2017), "Human Rights and Communism", in Fürst, Juliane; Pons, Silvio; Selden, Mark (eds.), The Cambridge History of Communism: Volume 3, Endgames? Late Communism in Global Perspective, 1968 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1-108-50935-0

AmateurEditor (talk) 09:51, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

I don't think this approach is productive. Instead of providing quotes, which may be incorrectly interpreted if taken out of context, let's discuss the main author's ideas, and their relation to the topic. And, providing extended quotes without any specific reason is not good, because it may violate our copyright policy. I suggest to collapse this section.--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:28, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Yes, interpretations can be wrong. But that means we must start with direct quotes and minimize the risk of our own interpretations deviating from the author's views. The quotes are large enough that context is preserved, to address any "cherry-picked" concern. AmateurEditor (talk) 17:23, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

AmateurEditor, are you going to join the work on the "Causes" section? My impression from the quotes provided by you is that you aren't. The quotes are only marginally relevant to the topic (if relevant at all). In addition, providing more than 40 years old quote from a rightist newspaper (Chritchian Science Monitor) is a kind of disrespect. Please, do not derail the discussion.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:30, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Paul Siebert, I am trying to respond to criticism by multiple editors at once with different and sometimes conflicting criticisms, including yours. Davide King still misunderstands the topic, what secondary sources there are that include the topic, and what "cherry-picked" means. These quotes are about the article topic in general, not necessarily the causes section in particular. You will notice that the Christian Science Monitor source is one of the sources cited by Valentino from our previous discussion. There is no disrespect in using it in context of its publication date. There is disrespect in deciding that we must now rewrite the causes section. You have not shown that the causes section needs a rewrite and your entire approach to using Wikipedia:Search engine tests is wrong. Your attempt at Wikipedia:Mediation didn't give you the result you wanted. I am getting the impression that you are determined to rewrite the article regardless of what I say or policy forbids. AmateurEditor (talk) 18:09, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

I expected mediation to lead to something productive. Instead, the same arguments were repeated again and again, so I gave up.

No, it is not a disrespect. I described a number of severe problems with that section, including direct and blatant misinterpretations of the sources. My concern has not been properly addressed, which means my criticism was valid. To additionally check if my criticism is correct, I proposed to summarize what each author says about causes of MKuCR (without taking author's opinia out of context). For the beginning, I summarized Rummel's and Valentino's views on that account. Do you have any problems with those summaries? Do you agree with them? If we do the same with other authors, we can easily see if the section was written correctly, and if not, we can easily decide which authors should stay, and how their views should be presented.

It seems that must be absolutely obvious to any reasonable person: If a concern is raised about a possible misinterpretation of sources, the first step should be: let's summarize briefly the main idea of that source and check what exactly the author says about the topic in a context of the main author's idea. That is exactly what I proposed - and still no reaction from you. Why?--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:05, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Again, I agree with Siebert on the approach. In regards to accusations, again, they can go both ways:

AmateurEditor still misunderstand the topic, what sources there are that include the topic and those that do not, and what authors support and do not support. ... There is disrespect in deciding that we must not rewrite the Causes section because they are the one who wrote it and say there is nothing wrong with it. You have not shown, and have repeatedly failed in doing so, that Siebert's analysis of causes section and their entire approach to using Wikipedia:Search engine tests are wrong. Your attempt at bludgeoning the process gave you the result you wanted so far (no rewrite) but not the one you needed (we did not go away). I am getting the impression that you are determined to push a wall against any attempt at an article rewrite, which would greatly improve the article towards NPOV, regardless of what our policies say or forbid.

I think that such accusations are clearly blown up, as no rewrite has actually been put in place and you are perfectly free to make your own edits without getting reverted by us. Finally, clearly one of us must be wrong but I think that the implications would be much different. If we are proven wrong, and the reason why we are still passionate about it and are still here is that we have not been proven wrong (no matter what you say or think), about the topic, Valentino, all other authors, etc. — we will be the first, I will be the first to admit defeat, showing that we may be passionate, and sometimes 'aggressive', but always in good faith and never disrespectful, so your accusations are false; on the other hand, to retrieve a correct point raised by Siebert, if we are proven correct, you and many, many other users would have been engaged for years and years in willingly defending numerous policies violations in this article, despite Siebert and others giving enough evidence in their support, and this can have, and already has had (many users take this article as the Gospel, and I was one of them), serious consequences. Davide King (talk) 09:26, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Just a quick note regarding this edits. I didn't check the current article text, but if that is the last edit, then it is another example of tendentious editing. In reality, the dispute was summarized as follows:

"A critic of Rummel’s democide estimates for Yugoslavia (Dulić, 2004a) argued, on the basis of considerable documentation, that Rummel’s estimates for democide in Yugoslavia during World War II and in the immediate aftermath of the war were much too high. He also questioned whether similar data problems might occur in other democide estimates. Rummel (2004a, b) thanked him for his contribution to research on democide, but dismissed the overall claims of the critique, since Dulić had only commented on a portion of the time period covered by Rummel. Dulić (2004b) was not convinced."

I am too lazy to give a reference, that is one of the sources I cited previously. There were TWO articles authored by Dulic, and the last one said that Rummel's responce was not convincing. What is the reason to ignore it?. Again, the current text is very, very biased. It must be fixed. --Paul Siebert (talk) 21:23, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

If I may leave a quick comment, I am glad that you noticed this. It appears as we give any author the same weight but they do not hold the same weight, so according to this low standard, we must add Rummel's response, even though WEIGHT and academic sources do not find it due precisely because it was not convincing and ultimately it appears that Rummel lost the debate. I think that this quote by Fifelfoo from the 2018 peer review will always be relevant as long as this article continues to be this way: Either the topic is an accepted significant scholarly belief about the nature of the external world first and foremost, and therefore claims are put as fact. Or it ain't, in which case the article needs to be refactored to strip fact and discuss the "theory." ... Throw the fringe, harshly criticised, and narrowly received scholars on the bonfire. Get it out of the body of the article where it is unweighty. If the only claims which give the article notability are unweighty there shouldn't be a section on historical phenomena at all, the article should be about a fringe or rejected scholarly position. If there are some rejected and some accepted scholars, guess where the rejected scholars belong? Davide King (talk) 21:59, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Quick comments

I really can not wait for Paul Siebert to take down each source one by one, which is why I open this section to improve readability and give the above space all to AmeteruEditor and Siebert themselves, but it is still worth a quick comment. At first glance, the above section ironically just prove that Siebert is correct, and does not address our points, which is not that no source exists but that you are selective about them, they all come from the proponents, and you have failed to explain how and why such sources represents the majority view, or how somehow this means we cannot use country experts. Worse of all, we actually have a bunch of Main, See also, etc. but ironically those are to be used when we are making a summary of such articles and the link is there precisely if one wants to find out more. In this case, the 'summary' completely contradicts them because, well, country experts disagree with genocide studies, and I do not see why they should hold any weight considering that they are scholars of Communism, and this article is very much centered on Communism, especially when they are more mainstream, while genocide studies are a minority and did not appear in mainstream political science academic journal.

Biggest problems

Biggest problems are:

1. There is not a single secondary source about the proponents to verify and to make sure they are not misrepresented (OR/SYNTH). Is it really so hard to find a source summarizing Courtois', Rummel's, any other's thoughts about the topic without relying on their own primary work?
2. They all look cherry picked. You did not engage in a honest and neutral research, as you simply picked up any source that supported your views but no source that could help us determine whether they are correct; you did not even need to follow Siebert's research criteria, which were positively reviewed in an academic journal, you simply need to look at sources outside this bubble. None of this address Siebert's and mine concerns, or for why we should only use those sources and not country experts. The only reason I can think of why is that they could completely demolish your views.

Analysis

A quick analysis:

1. Did you really just use not one but two sources that even predates the dissolution of the Soviet Union? This looks like you cherry picked sources and wanted to run up the numbers. They have no use, and who the hell is Todd Culberston? Titled "Human Cost of Communism", it is published by Human Events, conservative American political news and analysis website. Are you serious? Did you really also just cited an op-ed? A view by the (U.S. government's, I presume) administration? Then you wonder why such article is seen as an anti-communist propaganda, when a proper and neutral article about it could be easily created by following Siebert's proposals. Any source that does not reflect the most recent consensus on estimates is to be taken extremely cautiously, if it has any use at all, other than showing the evolution of estimates.
2. You continue to misinterpret scholars like Valentino, even though Siebert showed you secondary sources, while you hide behid the facade of verificability, which borders on OR/SYNTH due being based on your own personal reading of Valentino. Courtois, Rummel, and Valentino propose all three different things, even if slightly related. Courtois is about double genocide theory and the equivalency between class and racial genocide on one hand, and Communism and Nazism on the other hand (according to a reliable secondary source, which provided a positive review, only Courtois made the comparison between Communism and Nazism, while the other sections of the book "are, in effect, narrowly focused monographs, which do not pretend to offer overarching explanations." Paczkowski wonders whether it can be applied "the same standard of judgment to, on the one hand, an ideology that was destructive at its core, that openly planned genocide, and that had an agenda of aggression against all neighboring (and not just neighboring) states, and, on the other hand, an ideology that seemed clearly the opposite, that was based on the secular desire of humanity to achieve equality and social justice, and that promised a great leap of forward into freedom", and states that while a good question, it is hardly new and inappropriate because The Black Book of Communism is not "about communism as an ideology or even about communism as a state-building phenomenon."), Rummel is about government and totalitarianism in general, and Valentino is about mass killing in the 20th century and propose Communist mass killing as a subcategory of dispossessive mass killing vs. coercive mass killing. Like Karlsson and Schoenhals (2008), Mann says that they were the results of unbalanced and rapid industrialized, and that Pol Pot wanted to increase agricultural production in order to obtain money for rapid industrialization (Mann 2005, p. 343). Such works are about Genocide, Mass killing, and the like in general, not MKuCR; indeed, Mann's book is called The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. This means that you likely cherry picked the parts where they discuss some Communist states, completely ignored that they also compare them to non-Communist states, and none of your views are backed by secondary sources like Siebert's, hence your cherry picking of primary sources' quotes is worthless in this sense, as it borders OR/SYNTH, unless secondary sources are found that prove your own reading is the correct one.
3. Your cherry picking of Rosefielde ignores that his main point is that Communism in general, even if he focuses mostly on Stalinism, is less genocidal, and that is a key distinction from Nazism. This is precisely why we need scholarly sources that tell us what those authors propose, lest we engage in OR/SYNTH or WEIGHT violations by cherry picking quotes that we may personally like but scholarly sources completely ignores because it is not Rosefielde's or Valentino's main point.
4. I see that you bolded any reference to communism or Communist regimes but none of those quotes actually provide a clear link, and they are a minority in that the majority of scholars do not make such grouping. Many of those sources come from genocide studies, which for the umpteenth time is a minority school of thought that has yet to gain mainstream status within academic political science, so we must keep in mind NPOV and WEIGHT, while you only keep in mind VERIFY.
5. To quote TFD, Jones' book is a textbook which by definition summarizes the literature. Textbooks are not written to present original information or the views of their authors. So don't expect academic papers to cite it. Note that his book does not have a chapter on MKuCR. Instead it has separate chapters for "5 Stalin and Mao" and "7 Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge." So it's off topic for MKuCR. I am also interested in an in-depth analysis of Bradley 2017, since this is one you recently brougth out and also added to the article but note that by your own quote the topic seems to be Communism and human rights, rather than MKuCR—just like Jones', where TFD's comment also apply here—as it is made clear at the start. So all we have is more misreading by you and cherry picking, not addressing our points. This is no bueno.

I will stop here from now, it was longer than I wished. I cannot wait to see Siebert's response, and I also encourage The Four Deuces to analyze given sources, especially the authors and the publishers, since they are very good at determining whether they are academic, popular press, their expertise, their lack of it, etc.

Davide King (talk) 13:00, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

On the approach

Paul Siebert, in regards to this, I agree in that you are correct this is not a productive approach, it should be collapsed, and I prefer the approach you outlined above (that is exactly what we should be doing, especially to avoid further OR/SYNTH) though I really wish I could see you take on each source like you did with the ones currently at Causes, especially because way too many users may just look at those sources, and like WP:OVERCITE says, it can call the notability of the subject into question by editors. A well-meaning editor may attempt to make a subject which does not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines appear to be notable through quantity of sources. Ironically, this serves as a red flag to experienced editors that the article needs scrutiny and that each citation needs to be verified carefully to ensure that it was really used to contribute to the article.

This applies equally well to the article because on the surface it appears to be well-written, thoroughly researched, with tons of references, and all of them converted into sfns, which is something I really like and most good articles have, but we do know that this is not true. Yet, many users may fell for it, or be misled from those apparently tons of sources (again, our concern is not sources but how they are used, and NPOV and OR/SYNTH violations, not that there are no sources), etc. This is why I think an in-depth analysis from you, as you did for Cause, will be helpful to let our readers choose from themselves, rather than just look at the numbers of space used and sources, and think they are all good and there are no issues. You may do this at your own talk page and simply leave a link here to there, but I think that you should do it. Sources should not be taken at face value but scrutinized to make sure that there are no policy violations; VERIFY is but one policy, unfortunately it usually triumphs over much more relevant ones like NPOV, OR, SYNTH, and WEIGHT. We need to prove this beyond any doubt because this article has different rules, and so we need to do the double work just to prove it. If it was any other article, this discussion would have been over a long time ago. So just criticizing the approach for cherry picking quotes and sources is not enough for this article, we need to take them down one by one; unless we do so, such sources will continue to be misread and taken at face value, and defenders will continue to point at them to dismiss any attempts or approach at a solution or rewrite.

And even then, it may not be enough because I think TFD is right when they said that A would be synthesis. It would be like mass killings in English speaking countries. Some connection between speaking English and mass killing would have to be made. There are I think two versions of B: (i) Some writers have connected mass killings in Stalin's USSR, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The thinking is that Stalin influenced Mao, who influenced Pol Pot. In all cases, mass killings were carried out as part of a policy of rapid industrialization. (ii) The other version is that mass killings were dictated in otherwise forgotten works of Karl Marx. Under this view, COVID-19 can be seen as the latest attempt by the Communists to wipe out the world population. Anyone who argues for A probably believes B (ii). We simply cannot argue or win a debate with believers. No matter how we show that authors are misinterpreted by their own reading of primary sources, and we do so by providing secondary reliable sources that are specifically about their work and published in peer-reviewed academic journals, they will continue to argue that Valentino et al. support MKuCR, and support policy violations or twisting them to justify this.

P.S. When it comes to genocide, modernity and/or industrialization all have a bigger, clearer link than communism. Davide King (talk) 16:25, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Davide King, you have too many errors in your comments for me to respond to them all, but:

1) These are all secondary sources for the topic of mass killings under communist regimes. You don't need secondary sources for how to understand secondary sources. You either continue to misunderstand what secondary sources are or you are secretly assuming a different topic for the article than what it actually is. We are supposed to be searching for sources with content on the article's aggregation topic, not our own OR analysis of google; finding sources about the article topic is not what Wikipedia:Cherrypicking means. A source does not have to be only about the topic.

2) If you think they are cherry-picked, meaning that they misrepresent the author's views, then prove it with quotes of the missing information. Just asserting that they are cherry-picked is not enough for me to take the point seriously. Again, a source can discuss a topic without it being the only or even main topic they discuss. Noting that a source discusses other topics in addition to this one, is not relevant.

3) the two sources that predate the fall of the Soviet Union are cited as sources by Valentino, a professor at Princeton. They are currently in the article in the context of their publication dates and their estimates fall within the range of the other sources. Including them does not run up numbers. You seem to be adding artificial conditions to the article that wikipedia policies do not require.

4) the essay WP:OVERCITE is about too many inline citations, not about too many citations in the article where each sentence has one or two citations. AmateurEditor (talk) 17:53, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Do not worry, it is reciprocal. Thanks for keeping it short.

(1) Except they are not about MKuCR but Communist death toll ("Available evidence indicates that perhaps 100 million persons have been destroyed by the Communists ... The number of people murdered by communist regimes is estimated at between 60 million and 150 million, with the higher figure probably more accurate in light of recent scholarship ... If the precise numbers have always been, and continue to be, in dispute, their order of magnitude is not.") You are mixing the two, mixing sources that follow Valentino's methodology, which is what this article should be about, with those who have completely different criteria; how is this a good thing is beyond me. Just call it for what it is, and rename it Communist death toll then, but do not use mass killing when you are not using it in reference to Mass killing but to any killing with at least, like what, 4 people dead. It makes no sense to base an article on the latter; the former is also backed by scholarly sources like Valentino, so why do we not just limit to them?

(2) That is exactly what I was going to do, and I had my comment finished and was about to publish it, then I saw you responded, so I reply to you back and then publish it below. As stated by Siebert, quotes are not a good way to do that because they can be easily cherry picked and missing context. It is also why I believe Siebert and I should engage them. It is clearly relevant, as it shows you cherry picked them; either way, this can be easily solved if you could do what Siebert did and provide sources commenting such works in support of MKuCR as you see it.

(3) Clearly, Wikipedia requires that we use reliable sources, the two ones you cited are not; one is published by a conservative website, is obviously outdated, and pushes fringe estimates from Solzhenitsyn as facts, the other is a op-ed, which certainly is not the kind of definitive source one would expect from an aggregator. Also Valentino is not the ultimate source on estimates, and is certainly a better source about mass killing than their estimates; again, see Harff 2017 ("Compiling global data is hazardous and will inevitably invite chagrin and criticism from country experts. Case study people have a problem with systematic data because they often think they know better what happened in one particular country. I have sympathized with this view, because my area expertise was the Middle East. But when empiricists focus on global data, we have to consider 190 countries and must rely on country experts selectively. When we look for patterns and test explanations, we cannot expect absolute precision, in fact we do not require it.").

(4) You missed my point, which was that, like the essay said, too many citations may raise a red flag about whether they have been cherry picked to show the article has sources, to give it legitimacy, etc. Similarly, this article gives a false impression because it appears to be well-sourced and well-written but in reality violates NPOV, OR/SYNTH, and WEIGHT. Of course, you disagree. Davide King (talk) 18:20, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Neutral research

I am not sure how Siebert's neutral research work exactly but it appears that they really did cherry pick the source by typing communism and mass killings, or something like that, which is not a neutral approach, as that only yields what you want to find. You should type mass killing and then "mass killing", or genocide and mass killing and then "genocide and mass killing", to reduce the research and then actually analyze sources; however, the wording needs to be neutral and should not include the conclusion you are searching for, so no communism and the like. We need to find out how many of those articles or book are about Communism only (1), discuss Communism (2), briefly mention it in passing (3), or do not mention it at all (4). By looking at sources, the majority are (3) and (4) in any order, followed by (2), and finally by (1). The fact you cherry picked up or typed words to get the results you wanted is proven by the fact I could not find most of your sources, apart from the likes of Jones and Valentino, who are neither about MKuCR.

Incidentally, as an example, I got several sources that we use at Mass killing like Atsushi and Tago, Esteban, Morelli, and Rohner, Staub, Valentino, etc. I also find out "Mass killings in the United States from 2006 to 2013: social contagion or random clusters?" Is this really the "generic mass killing" you refer too? Clearly, we should not rely on either "generic Communism" or "generic mass killing" but on mass killing as defined at Mass killing and follow Valentino's, so the scope must be limited to Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes; both Jones and Valentino limit to them in their chapters, no matter how many quotes you can cherry pick without context. You must decide, you either want it to be a sub-article of Mass killing, or you want to make it about Communist death toll, in which case just rename it to the latter but at least do not confuse readers with terminology and the made-up "generic mass killing", when it does not follow from the main article Mass killing. Davide King (talk) 18:21, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

A neutral search works as follows. You use different keyword sets and compare results. Each set may be non-neutral, but if you try the whole spectrum of reasonable keyword sets, you may find sources that (i) are the same in most search results, (ii) are frequently cited by peers. These are the sources that will probably be found by any unbiased Wikipedian with no preliminary knowledge of the subject.

With regard to your search results, I am not sure what exactly you are looking for. It seems you are trying to find generic sources about genocide and mass killing. Why?--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:14, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Paul Siebert, thank you. I did type different keywords related to the topic, including not using and then using quote marks. So what keywords should I type? My goal was to find out how much Communism and Communist states are discussed within mass killing and genocide as a topic. As I said, most sources either briefly mentioned it in passing, without any chapter, or do not mention it at all (apart from Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot), followed by those who do (again, mainly Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, not MKuCR), and the least are those who specifically focus on Communism as a whole ("generic Communism"), which are a tiny minority of all sources on the topic. What I was trying to demonstrate is that we fix on Communism when it is not even the major topic of mass killing and genocide, which focus less on regime-type and much more on genocide and mass killing in wildly different societies, i.e. they compare the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Cambodia, etc. By the way, thank you so much for your summary of the author, which is what we should be doing when we disagree on what they support (so you are right on this). After you have done that, I still wish to see you take down those sources right above because Davide King (talk) 08:50, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

A further example that shows how most of those sources were cherry picked, or at least do not clearly represent all or majority sources on the topic, is as if AmateurEditor searched for sources comparing Nazism and Stalinism but only chose those that emphaisized the similarities and ignored all those that either emphasized the differences, or ignored and rejected the comparative approach because, to quote The Oxford Handbook (2019), such a perspective, in reality a recapitulation of the long-discredited totalitarian perspective equating Stalin's Soviet Union with Hitler's National Socialist Germany, is not tenable. It betrays a profound misunderstanding of the distinct natures of the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, which made them mortal enemies. Stalin's primary objective was to forge an autarkic, industrialized, multinational state, under the rubric of 'socialism in one country.' Nationalism and nation-building were on Stalin's agenda, not genocide; nor was it inherent in the construction of a non-capitalist, non-expansionary state—however draconian. This is what AmateurEditor did, and what most defenders of this article do. Is this a fair and relevant comparison to make? In my view, it certainly is. Davide King (talk) 08:57, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Thought experiment on Communist death toll

Paul Siebert, you are free to correct if wrong, but it appears to be that the whole body-counting and Communist death toll is sloppy scholarship. It is one thing for a country specialist to estimate the dead in a single event, it is a whole lot another on not just to estimate every single event in the country's history but to do it for any country considered to be Communist. This is why it is mainly biased and controversial scholars like Courtois and Rummel who did that; if we were to use and apply their same standards to similar regimes, Communism would not be the worst system ever by death toll or other measures (like considering the duration, pre- and post-population numbers, deaths by population percentage and by the number of countries ruled by the same system, etc.), and Rummel apparently believed that colonialism and fascism were forms of socialism (per The Four Deuces), not of capitalism. Even a similar anti-communist like Conquest, at least in his academic works that I am aware of (again, what one writes in a book published by the popular press does not hold the same weight as what the same author writes in a book published by the academic press), did not do that and limited himself to the Soviet Union, in particular the Stalin era.

If one would want to provide a more accurate and reliable numbers on Communism, e.g. relying on the most accurate and reliable figures by country experts, one could not do that because it would be OR/SYNTH, as none of them engaged in Communist death toll; is this a correct view, Siebert? And yet, by relying on Courtois and Rummel, both of whom Karlsson and Schoenhals (2008) describe as being on the fringes, no matter that Valentino may rely on them for the estimates (again, Valentino is reliable for mass killing, not for their estimates, and I believe that he mainly reported them for historic purposes, which is fine, not that he necessarily support or endorse them), we violate NPOV and WEIGHT. Therefore, the only real solution to improve NPOV and WEIGHT is to at least rely on country experts and specialists for the events, especially where genocide scholars and other authors are clearly contradicted and wrong, and mention the criticism for both the highest estimates and the whole methodology of body-counting by ideology. I do not see how this would be controversial or OR/SYNTH. OR/SYNTH would be what I explained about the death toll, not what Siebert suggests. Davide King (talk) 11:51, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

First. Rummel is NOT a controversial author. He is just misused. His main goal was to find worldwide correlations between various parameters of regimes and state violence. To do that, he needed a global database of death toll. Since no such database existed, he decided to collect ALL available data and, since some of those figures were inaccurate and noisy, he performed statistical treatment and found a lower and upper boundary of reasonably accurate estimates. Actually, he didn't care about accuracy, and Harff explicitly wrote about that (at least in two separate publications). However, for Rummel's own conclusions that inaccuracy was not a problem, because even if we put modern and correct data to his database and perform factor analysis, we will see the same correlations (with minor modifications). Rummel's figures are old, obsolete and blatantly inaccurate for all countries where correct numbers were not known during the Cold war: for Yugoslavia, USSR, China and some other countries (but not for Cambodia, where the original data set appeared to be correct). The problem with Rummel is quite simple: first, he used old and very inaccurate estimates, and, second, he treated statistical data as if the distribution were normal. That was a serious mistake, which was noted by Dulic: if the distribution curve is normal, by averaging lower and upper bounds you get the average value. However, in his data set, the curve is always skewed: it is limited by zero, but it has no upper limit, which means a set of noisy data is always skewed to higher values. Imagine, you have a set of several numbers: 1,1,1,5,2, 10. You calculate lower and upper bound of distribution, and they are, e.g. 1.2 and 7. If you take an average value, you get 4.1, which is much higher than the most probable value (which may be 1.5, because 10 is most likely an unreliable figure, which should be just disregarded).

Anyway, Rummel is good for his overall conclusions about "democratic peace" and that totalitarian regimes are more prone to violence (although it seems to be obvious even without him). And he is bad an obsolete for figures.

Second, Courtois is controversial. But he does not speak about "Communist mass killings", he speaks about the death caused by Communists (which is not the same).

Third, the problem is not in Courtois figures, but in their interpretations. Not only he produced the "Total Communist death toll", he did that with some very concrete purpose: to demonstrate that Communism was worse than Nazism. Which is an ahistorucal manipulation. Many authors pointed at various flaws and errors in Courtois texts, and it is fundamentally incorrect to present Courtois' opinion without explaining why and how he tried to manipulate with the data. And that is exactly what this article is doing.

In general, we have NO reliable figures for "Communist death toll" for two reasons.

1. This issue is beyond the scope scope of serious authors.

2. Different authors disagree on what categories of mass mortality should be ascribed to Communists's activity.

However, we DO have reliable and trustworthy figures for each country, and it will NOT be OR to combine in one chapter if we do not add them together. We just take raw numbers from each source (thus, some consensus figures exist for Great Purge, for Soviet famine, for collectivization, for Chinese famine etc). We do not need to add them, let a reader see them and make a conclusion. Global figures should be moved to the bottom and supplemented with explanations of their historical context.

However, I would like to finish with "Causes" first. It needs major rewrite, because it is a collection of twisted and cherry-picked statements, some of them are totally false and unsuppoted by the cited sources (in contrast to User:Schetm's assertion).--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:14, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Paul Siebert, I think that this was very helpful, so thank you.

Courtois and Rummel

When I said 'controversial', I was mainly referring to his whole take on Communism, so it is precisely his skewed numbers and estimates for Communism that made him controversial in that sense; if he was consistent, he would actually be an anarcho-communist with individualist leanings (yes, it actually exists), as it is concentrated economic and political power that cause democide; apparently, he believes that it is caused by the latter, and also that anarchy, by which he means chaos, is actually worse than state government, so that is why he was a minimal-government European-style liberal, but I am digressing. His expertise is democratic peace, not Communism; he is mainstream on the former, and on the fringe on the latter. I think that his fringe politics and views, like colonialism and fascism being forms of socialism, cannot be ignored or overlooked when it comes to politics and Communism (he is a reliable source for his field of expertise, not for Communism), so we must be careful with him and only use his works published by the academic press, where I imagine that such fringe views are not present. Incidentally, Rummel is the only author sourced to a secondary source in the Causes section (I am fine with it, perhaps just with a copyediting to clarify the factor analysis), and as a result, as you wrote, he is the first source in the section that was used correctly without any serious reservations. However, Rummel is a pioneer and an expert in application of Factor analysis to social sciences, so his own findings are correlations, whereas his other theorizing are less valuable (and less cited). IMO, the focus in the text should be shifted to real correlations found by Rummel, whereas his weasel words are much less valuable. So why can we not just do the same for all others? This would greatly reduces OR/SYNTH and misreading of primary sources on our part. I agree on Courtois being controversial and not actually speaking about Communist mass killings.

Third, the problem is not in Courtois figures, but in their interpretations. This is precisely what I meant when I said Communist death toll is sloppy scholarship. It is not that we cannot have reliable numbers about them, it is precisely that the whole Communist death toll exists to push an anti-communist narrative. The problem is that actually using the reliable numbers could be OR/SYNTH because such specialists do not engage in the whole Communist death toll narrative, so if there is one thing AmateurEditor may be correct is that this could be OR/SYNTH, but they are dead wrong on everything else, and even in this case, it is a shame that this would be considered OR/SYNTH because it would be providing much more accurate and reliable numbers that would show the Communist death toll to be much lower than the 100 million figure; if supporters loves to cite that the numbers may not be completely accurate but the order of the magnitude is correct, then why fixate on the 100 million figure or the estimates from the higher-end? I mean, even just the 6–9 million figure used by Snyder 2011 for the Stalin era is awful, so I do not really get what is the point of inflating it to the point of absurd, which is very disrespectful to the victims, many of whom were communists or leftists themselves (unsurprisingly, this is totally ignored in the victims of Communism narrative). Perhaps because there are worse regime types than Communism, and this goes against the narrative? I do not know but that looks like the only likely reason for their fixing in the highest numbers.

But back to the main point, I would like to see how you could structure the more accurate and reliable estimates from country specialists; it could still be OR/SYNTH according to AmateurEditor but perhaps it can be done without violating it exactly as you wrote, i.e. it will NOT be OR to combine in one chapter if we do not add them together, the latter, bolded being exactly what I meant when I said that it could be OR/SYNTH, while the first part would not be OR/SYNTH, so we agree on this. Anyway, the main point is that the process itself of such body-counting is not NPOV because it is used to push the narrative, and we are violating WEIGHT because we are giving disproportionate weight to the few (controversial) scholars who have done, and the many non-experts authors who have done it to push the narrative, not to reach the most accurate and reliable numbers based on consistent and highly-regarded academic methodology. In short, as you wrote, we have NO reliable figures for "Communist death toll" ... . However, we DO have reliable and trustworthy figures for each country ... . Yet, AmateurEditor insist that we do not rely on country experts and specialists, or the best sources in general, but instead rely only on a tiny minority of genocide scholars (again, as you noted, minority school of thought that has failed to achieve mainstream status in political science academic journals), which incidentally are also the main proponents, and goes contrary to Wikipedia's rule of using independent sources of a topic. There is still a disagreement about the topic: you and I want it to be about the events and use the best sources for them, and are even willing to use some of those genocide scholars, while AmateurEditor want it to be about the events but only from the perspective of a tiny minority of genocide scholars, which makes your assertion that they actually support the narrative–theory correct. Because writing about the events only from their perspective is precisely the narrative–theory. Davide King (talk) 17:10, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

David, may I ask you something? Please, stop posting anything here that is not relevant to the "Causes" section. We have already had enough fruitless discussion that lead to nothing. We need to do something concrete. Let's see if we will be capable of rewriting that section, which is an outstanding collection of original research, cherry-picking and direct misinformation (as I can conclude from my analysis of just one subsection). If we face an opposition to re-writing that ostensibly "well written and sourced section", then some other, more radical steps will be needed. So far, I got ZERO objections or refutations of my criticism, and I conclude that other users either agree with that criticism or they just are not reading the talk page. I am going to make some signifocant changes (as required by our core content policies), and see the reaction. If there will be no serious opposition (except copy editing), or if some productive couter-proposal will me made, that means we will be peacefully and gradually improving this article. However, if that step will trigger an edit war... well, let's think about that later. Hopefully, that will never happen.

Maybe, if you collapse (for a while) all your recent posts (along with my responces) that are not relevant to "Causes", that may make this discussion more readable, and more users will join us. I have a feeling that your wordy posts have an opposite effect: noone is reading them.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:05, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

I hope that my recent 'collapses' were helpful in this, including all the sources; they are still there, just collapsed. I am just very passionate about all this but you are correct and I see your point. Besides, you explain better than I could all the problems, so if that will help us moving forward, then I am all for it. So be it, I leave the space.
Davide King (talk) 21:14, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Causes

Before we started to rewrite it, let's summarize the view of each author that will be used in that section. So far, it is clear that Rummel and Valentino will stay. If someone wants to add some other source, add it to the list and describe the author's position as whole, as well as a linkage between the author's theoretical views and our topic. Cherry-picking is not welcome.

I suggest the following approach:

1 What is the main author's concept?

2 Which category of events the author analysed?

3 How author's conclusions are related to our (sub)topic?

For example, if the subtopic is "Causes of MKuCR", and the author writes about MKuCR specifically. then we can just reproduce what they say. If the author writes about, e.g. "democide" and totalitarianosm, and Communism is just a subttopic of their study, we should briefly explain that the author found the linkage between totalitarianism and democide, and then explain how that (in author's opinion) relates to our subtopic (mass killings and Communism). If the authors writes about, e.g. Great Purge only, we explain their view of the causes of Great Purge.

If you believe the procedure is incomplete, propose your amendments/corrections.

• Rummel.

Main subject: State violence in general, and killing of civilians by their own state ("democide") as a subset thereof.

Major findings:

Factor analysis of the global genocide database (collected from Cold-war era data) demonstrates a significant correlation between democide and such regime parameter as totalitarianism. Based on that correlation, author concluded that "absolute power kills absolutely", and links totalitarianism with democide (a.k.a. mass killings). Since Communist regimes are totalitarian, the author concludes their totalitarianism is the primary cause of mass killings.

How the author links ideology and mass killings. He actually draws no direct casual linkages, his main approach is to find correlations (and we know that correlation does not imply causation). However, since the author is libertarian, and he believes that the less state, the better, it seems obvious to him that totalitarianism, which is an opposite to libertarianism, is the worst possible state system, and the absolutist ideology (as he sees Marxism) exacerbates the worst features of totalitarianism.

• Valentino.

Main subject:

Explanation of the onset of "Mass killings" (i.e. killing of more than 50,000 civilians in less than 5 years, reproduced from memory, correct me if some figure is wrong).

Major findings:

This author developed a new theory of mass killings. This theory states that mass killings occur when a small group of elite leaders decides that mass killings is the optimal way to achieve their goals (i.e., in their perception, "advantages" of the mass killing approach outweigh their "disadvantages"). He performed comparative analysis of eight cases of what he defines as mass killings, including three cases that took place under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and one case in Soviet controlled Afghanistan (other cases were non related to Communism), and this analysis corroborated the theory. A main practical consequence of this theory is that elimination of a small group of leaders from power may prevent mass killings even if the social structure stays the same.

How the author links ideology and mass killings. According to Valentino, and contrary to earlier Rummels conjecture, the regime type, ideology or similar factors are insufficient to explain onset of mass killings. Valentino conceded that ideology, to some degree, may shape a strategy of some leaders who are prone to mass killings.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:00, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

• Goldhagen, Pipes, Gray.

Existing information is insufficient for making a summary. If found the brief description of their view in the article, and it is as follows:

"Scholars such as Rummel (already discussed) Daniel Goldhagen, Richard Pipes, and John Gray consider the ideology of communism to be a significant causative factor in mass killings."

The sources for this statement are Harff, 1996 and Harff&Gurr, 1988. The first source is a review on Rummel exclusively, which means it is totally unrelated to other authors. Moreover, it contains not a single word "Ideology". The second source does not mention Goldhagen (which is not a surprise, because his own writings were published after 1988), Gray and Pipes. That means the whole statement is fake. Note, I just started to analyze this text, and I have already found so many blatant errors, twistings and distortions. --Paul Siebert (talk) 23:39, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

• Goldhagen.

Main subject

In his "Worse than war" the author put forward the idea that the desire to eliminate peoples or groups should be understood as the overarching category and the core act, and makes it the focus of his study.

Major findings:

The author delineates five principal forms of eliminationism - transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, extermination, where difference between destruction of people and other forms of repressions (not always lethal) is blurred.

How the author links ideology and mass killings. At page 207-9, the author explains that some Communist regimes use ideology to raise a new generation of indoctrinated eliminationists and to justify elimination of some groups. It seems ideology is seen as a tool rather a cause by him. I saw no direct or indirect clam that Communist ideology was a causative factor.

One more false statement. Continue digging.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:01, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

References

My concern is that "compare and contrast" is original research and should be sourced to secondary sources. Also, it is difficult to establish weight, that is, how to we determine how accepted the various approaches are? Pipes, Goldhagen and Rummel (particularly what he posts on his website) have extremely controversial views.

Also, they disagree on mass killings in Afghanistan. While the other authors attribute them to Communism, Valentino categorizes them as counter-insurgency mass killings along with killings carried out by U.S. backed death squads. IOW, he does not see the ideology of the perpetrators to be significant, but rather attributes it to how imperial powers treat people in war zones.

As I said before, it's not possible to write this article without considerable OR and weight issues. At some point someone may write an article or book about the subject, but without that we can't really go forward.

TFD (talk) 16:11, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

TFD, we may try to write this article without OR. As I explained, that can be done according to the following scheme:

• Soviet Union (description of each separate case, or group thereof, if most sources group some of them)

• China
• Cambodia

• ....

• Generalizations. (The latter section will be a description of those author who, like Courtois, draw some general conclusions; these narratives will be put in a proper context).

This approach is purely descriptive, which rules out a possibility of original research.

We have a choice between keeping this article in a current state (which is a piece of original research, POV pusing and fact distortion), or to try to make something reasonable. Your position by no means helps to make some progress. Can you please join the work on article's improvement? I propose to re-write this section for the beginning. Can you try to summarize other authors mentioned in this section or to comment on my summaries? That will help us to come to a joint decision on which authors should be included in this section, and in what context.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:09, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

I don't think that providing an accurate description of what sources say will address the weight issue: to "fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources." Imagine writing an article on climate change by summarizing various views without regard to their acceptance in scientific literature. It would be neutral in the sense that views of both scientists and cranks would be explained, but it would not be consistent with Wikipedia's neutrality policy. That article treats climate change as a fact and says that climate change denial is misinformation funded by the fossil fuel industry. While some people, such as Larry Sanger, argue that Wikipedia articles should give parity to various views, it's not current policy.

WP:TERTIARY says, "Reliable tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources, and may be helpful in evaluating due weight, especially when primary or secondary sources contradict each other." If we had such sources, then we could write a neutral article. But we don't.

TFD (talk) 17:12, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Paul Siebert, I'd be curious to read your response to The Four Deuces, and also hope to see the conclusion of your good source analysis. Davide King (talk) 22:08, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Outside comments

I would really like if The Four Deuces would respond you on this, so I respond to the OP to leave some space for both of you to discuss this. I sympathize with them that "it's not possible to write this article without considerable OR and weight issues" but I am willing to work with you and see what a rewrite would look like. Certainly, OR/SYNTH is not a good enough reason to dismiss you or a rewrite effort since, no matter what one may think or say, this article clearly fails both already, and also NPOV, and WEIGHT, and even basic VERIFY, as you digged deeper. On the other hand, this article is clearly not going to be deleted because so many users do not understand the topic, sources, etc. Your proposal is a good compromise, and I am curious to see how it would look like, all the differences, if it would really solve all issues of NPOV, OR/SYNTH, etc. Because all that matters to me is that we actually respect and follow our policies. Davide King (talk) 16:23, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

I agree with TFD's latest comment, and is why tertiary sources can be so important and helpful, yet AmateurEditor dismiss them, and actually did admit that there are none but that the article can still be written because it is notable by giving all views minority status; yet, this still clearly violates NPOV and WEIGHT. Even if an article may be notable (I am curious about TFD's response of AmeteurEditor's reading of criteria for notability, general sources, etc.), if it cannot be written without respecting NPOV and WEIGHT ... it should not be written, it is simple. Clearly, keeping the article as it is would be much worse than at least trying to fix it and rewrite it by trying to respect our policies; I do not think in the end it will respect our policies (per TFD) but trying does not hurt, and it would still be a great improvement; when both articles violates our policies, and cannot be written without not violating them, they should be deleted but rules do not apply to this article, so if both articles still violate our policies, I prefer a better-written article, one that does not even fail basic VERIFY as the current one, over the awful mess we have now. Paul Siebert, apparently previous wording was Daniel Goldhagen,[35] Richard Pipes,[36] and John N. Gray[37] have written about theories regarding the role of communism in books for a popular audience. It makes more sense but it is all sourced to primary sources, so a reader does not get what are those theories nor how accepted, or not, they are. But yeah, this article fails basic VERIFY ... but sure, it has no problems. Davide King (talk) 07:51, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

While AmateurEditor is correct that policy does not require tertiary sources for a topic to be notable, it does require secondary sources. While sources such as the Black Book are secondary sources in that they "provide[] an author's own thinking based on primary sources," they are primary sources for their opinions. We need a secondary source that reports them in order to establish their significance. In an article I created, Radical right (United States), I did not cite the theorists who created the concept, but used secondary sources writing about them. One editor wrote, "it is unimaginable that this article does not cite Hofstadter's seminal The Paranoid Style in American Politics." I replied that he was discussed in the article. While not required, using secondary sources helps to correctly interpret opinions, establish what is relevant and determine weight. TFD (talk) 13:03, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

The Four Deuces, you are right on this and all articles should actually follow your lead and article's example; that is the only way to actually respect our policies and guidelines. Perhaps the problem is that the Black Book is a secondary source, but AmateurEditor ignore that it is a primary source for its own interpretation, so they can dismiss our concerns by claiming that we are wrong about saying they are primary sources for their opinions and theories. To stay on topic, this is the problem of the whole Causes section. Apart from Rummel, everything is sourced to the authors' own work, rather than follow secondary sources, which results in all the problems of NPOV, OR/SYNTH, and even SYNTH because if we do not have independent, secondary sources for their own interpretation, we are engaging in OR/SYNTH by paraphrasing their own primary sources (worse of all, it is done wrong, hence even fails VERIFY), is this correct?

This could be fixed if we use secondary sources, like Paul Siebert did for Valentino; the problem is that such sources are not about the topic because MKuCR exists only in some users' minds, and the only good secondary source (Karlsson and Schoenhals 2008) says that Courtois and Rummel are fringe, and Siebert is still correct when they wrote sources that try to propose some theoretical schemes connecting Communism in general and mass killings (the BB, Rummel) are either obsolete or not mainstream, which is the point. The whole MKuCR is a rightist, anti-communist POV exercise, which makes it impossible to write a NPOV article about it, unless we follow the narrative topic. If we want to report on the events, we need to report all sources but limit it to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (if we want to report all events in all Communist states, the topic must be much broadened to be a scholarly analysis of Communism, and not limited to mass killings, because that is what scholars do, they provide all the necessary context and societal analysis); if we want to report on the narrative, we need to present it as such and not as fact; if we want to do both, the article needs to be rewritten. The current article pretends to do both but it follows the generic Communism grouping and treats it as an established fact, violating NPOV, OR/SYNTH, VERIFY, and WEIGHT in doing so, and merging the topic with Communist death toll. I am very curious about a comparison between Siebert's and TFD's full article, and then between the current article; I think this could help us to (1) highlight any differences between Siebert's and TFD's, and hoefully to (2) make it even more obvious how not-NPOV-adhering the current article is.

To remain on the topic of this section, I will try to summarize Courtois:

• Courtois.

Main subject: equivalency between class and racial genocide (Jaffrelot & Sémelin 2009, p. 37). In The Black Book of Communism, only Courtois made the comparison between Communism and Nazism, while the other sections of the book "are, in effect, narrowly focused monographs, which do not pretend to offer overarching explanations." The Black Book of Communism is not "about communism as an ideology or even about communism as a state-building phenomenon." (Paczkowski 2001)

Major findings: Courtois does not actually discuss mass killings, as he is not a genocide scholar. His views are considered to be on the fringes by Karlsson and Schoenhals.

How the author links ideology and mass killings. Courtois does not actually discuss mass killings but propose the equivalency between class and racial genocide, and between Communism and Nazism, which is controversial. Within the context of Communism and Nazism equivalence, Courtois is a proponent of the "victims of Communism" narrative, which he listed at 94 million, while he estimated that Nazis killed 25 million, hence Communism was worse.

Siebert, is this a good enough summary analysis of Courtois? Davide King (talk) 14:01, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll

Just a note for those who may be interested. I was just fixing some citation errors at List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, and edits made there may relate to the discussion going on here. ActivelyDisinterested (talk) 13:30, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

"Who killed more: fascism or communism?" is like when people argue about whether Superman or Batman would win in a fight. (Obviously Batman. And fascism.) Levivich 03:26, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

It actually has major consequences for political debates in modern Europe. If Nazism was the lesser evil, then collaborators were the true heroes of WWII, while the Resistance were traitors. The modern Left and even centrists and the moderate Right that opposed Nazism (such as Gaullists) can no longer claim the moral high ground. The Left must also bear responsibility for the crimes of Nazism, since they were necessary to fight the greater evil of Communism. Additionally, some on the Right argue that Hitler was actually a socialist (which both makes the Nazis less evil and allocates their crimes to the Left) or even that the Jews (since Communism was a Jewish project), were responsible for the Holocaust, which was necessary to stop Jewish Bolshevism.

That's why numbers become the only matter of importance. The 100 million victims of Communism is twice the 50 million victims of Nazism. The 10 million victims of the Ukrainian genocide (called the Holodomor for its similarity to the word Holocaust) is far greater than the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.

In the U.S., it proves a cautionary tale for the dangers of universal health care, gun control, vaccine mandates or whatever else is the issue of the day.

TFD (talk) 12:25, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Maybe, but some argue this apparent denialism of communism's tendency towards mass murder is a manifestation of the Left's romance with tyranny and terror. --Nug (talk) 22:27, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Nug, please, stay civil. Noone here denies such terrible events as Cambodian genocide, Great Purge or Katyn massacre. The main point is that some users, including you, are trying to push a (minority) view that (i) all premature deaths under Communists, including famine deaths were a results of a deliberate program that was implemented by Communist authorities and was aimed to exterminate their own people, (ii) that all those deaths are directly linked to Communism, and (iii) they had more commonalities with each other than with other mass killing events, and some common causes, and, therefore, should be presented as a single topic. That view is not shared by majority of scholars, and your attempts to accuse your opponents of denialism cannot change that. I respect your right to have your opinion, but I do not respect your right to have your own facts.

In addition, there is one important consideration here. Recently, the tendency to equate Communism and Nazism (or even to claim thet Communism was a greater evil) suspiciously coincide with attempts to push a "double genocide theory", to glorify former Nazi collaborators as "fighters against Communism", or "fighters for national independence". Therefore, in is sometimes hard to find the line where condemnation of Communism is becoming whitewashing of Nazism. We should be very careful with that. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:58, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Wrote this at the same time as Siebert.

If by some you mean the WorldNetDaily, which I assume is the owner of WND Books, which published the book you linked and has more to do with Islamo-leftism than MKuCR — you just proved that this is a right-wing talking point. Siebert, TFD was right — you're arguing with believers, which is why it is not going to take us anywhere. They actually believe there is such link, even though scholars do not draw such a link or conclusion, and focus more on leadership than ideology, and there may not be a difference for you but there actually is a difference between communism and Stalinism among most scholars. Just like Cloud200, you seem to take it as the ultimate truth that Stalin was the inevitable conclusion of Marx, even though that is one POV and mainly within anti-communist historiography (it may be mainstream among the popular press, especially on the Right, but that is not the view held by the most respected and neutral scholars); centre-right Jean-Claude Juncker defended Marx's legacy, so you are literally echoing Fidesz's reactions to it. This obsession with body-counting, especially in regards to communism but for every other ideology, too, is honestly disturbing and does not do justice to the many victims and all those who perished, it is in fact disrepectful.

While many, many people have died under Communist regimes, it is equally true for many other regime types on the other side, including even some who were and/or are democratic (e.g. the anti-communist politicide in democratic Sri Lanka, millions of preventable deaths under capitalism, etc.) — it appears to be that this is indeed a fetish of the Right to support their views of Communism as worse than Nazism; it really is done only for Communism, which is conflated for communism. By your own standard, there is a denial of capitalism/liberalism's tendency towards colonialism, ecocide, genocide, imperialism, and excess mortality due to distribution of resources (there are no memorials to commemorate them, nor remembrance days for victims of colonialism and imperialism, or resolutions against them, other than those rightly against Nazi-Fascism and Communism-Stalinism) — authoritarianism seems to be a much better link, irregardless of any ideology.

That communism is necessarily prone to authoritarianism, rather than one specific strand which simply feeds or breeds it, and vice versa (do I have to remind you that unlike — say fascism — there have actually been plenty of democratic communists?), is also not as a clear link as you would like to make it appear, and anyway is the job of scholars and other historians, not ours. If that is the kind of sources you have got, retry.

P.S. We actually had a RfC about this, which it was a snow close. Davide King (talk) 00:20, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

...you're arguing with believers, which is why it is not going to take us anywhere. This is my read of the situation as well. This is Kienger all over again. Levivich 00:25, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

There is even a university course on Mass Murder and Genocide under Communism. --Nug (talk) 06:13, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

A syllabus is not an RS. AFAICT the prof who teaches that course has been published but has published nothing about "mass murder and genocide under communism", which, to me, reinforces the lack of source for this topic. When editors ask about sources, providing examples of non-RS is just wasting everyone's time. Levivich 06:25, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Nug, I don't find your approach productive. It seems every participant of this discussion agrees that some mass killings, mass murders, and even genocide were committed by the authorities of some Communist states, and there is some commonality between some of them. That fact (and it is really a fact, not just someone's opinion) is a quite sufficient ground for existence of such a course, and the very fact of its existence proves nothing. The question is somewhat different, namely: can we pick a couple of sources, which, like Courtois, combine all premature deaths under Communists into one, single huge category, and by adding the works authored by mainstream authors, who do not share Courtois' views, write an article as if the Courtois views were universally accepted, thereby creating an absolutely false impression of the existence of some consensus among scholars that Communists, by using mass murder, deportations, deaths camps, engineered famine and similar tools deliberately exterminated 100 million people AND Communism is the greatest murderer of XX century? Paul Siebert (talk) 06:52, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

To add to what Levivich wrote, even your source proved my point, which is that events under Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes can indeed be categorized as mass killing events, which is what I have been arguing the whole time — if we follow the article's name and scholarly sources, this article should be limited only to them, at which point Siebert's comment that we already have each article for them and very little comparative analysis is correct, and another topic and scope should be pursued. If it was not clear enough, read my lips — we all agree that "some mass killings, mass murders, and even genocide were committed by the authorities of some Communist states, and there is some commonality between some of them."

No one is disputing the events, and all your arguments have been missing the point. What we are disputing and discussing is their interpretations and links, which are not universally supported among scholarly sources — can anyone answer Siebert's question about it? If none of you can do it, I hope Robert McClenon can do it for us and be done with, so that we can move forward to the next pass. Davide King (talk) 09:46, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Siebert's question around whether this article presents Courtois' views as universally accepted and fabricates a "consensus among scholars that Communists ... deliberately exterminated 100 million people AND Communism is the greatest murderer of XX century" is just a red herring, the article did not do this. In fact it was you yourself who added the 100 million figure[1] to which TFD brought up the comparison with Nazism being the lesser evil with his "The 100 million victims of Communism is twice the 50 million victims of Nazism" comment above. --Nug (talk) 11:01, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Well, let's see.

1. The article says that scholars are trying to propose some common terminology for MKuCR (the "Terminology" section.

2. The article creates an impression that the question of the total number of killed under Communists is a subject of a mainstream scholarly discourse ("Estimates" section)

3. The article outlines three groups of common causes ("Causes" section), and totally ignores historical context of each event, as well as opinia or country experts.

4. The article creates a false impression that famine (as a single phenomenon) is a subject of some "debates" ("Debates over famine" section), which is the case only for Holodomor (and even not the Great Soviet famine of 1932-33).

All of that is a minority viewpoind advocated by Courtois and few other authors, and all of that creates a core of teh article.

And after that you dare to claim my question is "red herring"? Paul Siebert (talk) 17:05, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Mass killings under authoritarian regimes would be the right title for an article about, e.g., comparisons of the Holocaust and Holodomor. Levivich 15:35, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Is such a comparison a mainstream topic? I tried to look at this, and it seems that when these two events are being discussed together, the discussion mostly focudes on their perception in Ukrainian society and globally. Therefore, such an article would be not about the events, but about views/theories that compare, link, contrast etc these events. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:43, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

I'd put a moratorium on any Mass killings under ... regimes article. It'd still be bordering on SYNTH because though it may seem obvious, such link is not so clear either — e.g. Harff 2017's counter-example of anti-communist politicide in democratic Sri Lanka. Why not just title it Comparison of the Holocaust and the Holodomor (or something this — there are other different variants and possibilities), The Holocaust and the Holodomor (politics/memory) in Ukraine, etc.

Just like Victims of communism would be a better title for this article — it is, in fact, what the topic is called by scholars (e.g. Ghodsee 2014, Neumayer 2017, Neumayer 2020, and Dujisin 2020), though another possibility, in regards to the only notable topic as summarized here by Siebert, could be Communism/Communist state and mass murder. Both titles would be acceptable as long as the article's topic is that summarized by Siebert, which is nothing other than this same topic but neutral and without OR/SYNTH. Davide King (talk) 00:44, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Status and Action ?

A request was made on 4 November for moderated discussion at DRN. Some of editors here, User:Cloud200, User:Paul Siebert, and User:Davide King, were participating in moderated discussion, and my intention as moderator was to develop one or more RFCs to try to resolve some of the controversy about this article. User:Levivich then proposed to take the article to a deletion discussion. I was then asked by User:Paul Siebert to put the moderated discussion on hold, because he could not take part in the AFD and the DRN at the same time. An AFD takes priority over all other content dispute resolution mechanisms including any RFCs. I put the DRN on hold as requested. I also said, here, at this talk page, that I recommended that a formal community process be initiated, which could be AFD (as proposed by Levivich) or one or more RFCs (as I was planning to take the DRN). More than four days have elapsed since User:Levivich proposed to start a deletion discussion, and there has not yet been a deletion discussion, and discussion seems to have become defocused again. If no one is planning to file an AFD, but the interested parties still want moderated discussion, I will resume the DRN. If there is to be an AFD, it might as well be started now. If the editors who originally wanted moderated discussion have decided that they do not want moderated discussion after all, but would prefer to continue unfocused discussion here, I will close the DRN as abandoned, although I think that will be a mistake, because there seems to be agreement that something should be resolved. So: Do the editors want a community process? Robert McClenon (talk) 05:44, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm not going to AFD it. I think this page should be turned into a disambiguation page, but I'm not sure if anyone else agrees. Either way no need to hold up DRN on my account. Levivich 06:04, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

If we all agreed that the article will survive AFD, so there is no need to start it, I definitely can continue with DRN. However, I expect all parties to take into account and address the thoughts and arguments that have been put forward during last few days here, on this talk page. One possible way is to summarize them briefly on the DRN page. Paul Siebert (talk) 06:42, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm open to any kind of moderated process and I think how Robert McClenon was leading it in the DRN was the best way to get constructive result. Cloud200 (talk) 11:38, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

IMO unless you define the scope/topic (not the title) of the article you'll be mired in hopeless complexity and have difficulty in moving forward. But, either way, if you have an excellent person like Robert McClenon to help moderate/resolve/organize your efforts, and a structure to do that under, you should grasp that great opportunity.North8000 (talk) 15:02, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

I have taken the DRN discussion back off of hold to resume it. As requested by User:Paul Siebert, I am requesting that each of the editors summarize the thoughts that were put forward here, before we go on with further discussion. I will add that my objective is to define the scope of the article, and suggestions in that direction are welcome.

I will add that other editors are welcome to comment in the DRN, and will not be required to comment every 72 hours, but that I plan to move the discussion along, typically every 48 to 72 hours, occasionally more frequently, as I think will be productive. So please summarize the arguments and thoughts at the DRN. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:50, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, Robert. On further reflection, I realized I have one more preliminary condition.

I would like to make sure I am arguing with rational persons, not believers, otherwise, as Levivich correctly noted, the whole discussion is senseless.

To do that, I propose each party to describe their main ideas again, and to demonstrate that it is falsifiable. Concretely, that included a description of possible evidences that may prove that those ideas are wrong. As an example, I can do that first. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:20, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

I am afraid that is not possible, Paul Siebert. One user has cited a far-right publisher (WorldNetDaily Books), the other has literally said that the double genocide theory and Holocaust trivialization in the lead is fringe, completely ignoring that while it may be mainstream where they live, it is in fact their beliefs that are fringe, not the quoted part from the current lead, which they want to remove outright, along with any other edit I have made in the last month to make it more neutral, clarify that there is no consensus on terminology or estimates, and fix the article from treating this as a mainstream, scholarly discourse and consensus. Davide King (talk) 17:20, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, you are absolutely right, but, as I already said, that question was repeatedly raised on this talk page. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:06, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

The problem is that the topic you correctly individuated here, which is the only notable topic that can be written about in respect with our policies instead of MKuCR, they actually believe in it and think it is a fact that Communism, which is conflated even for those on the Left who are anti-authoritarian and fully democratic, and in general is used to describe the Left in toto, is the greatest murderer of all-time — which clearly lacks any nuance and context, and is indeed a form of Holocaust trivialization and obfuscation because most scholars would say Nazism was worse, and Communism also has a good challenge from colonial and imperialist crimes (even by sheer numbers if capitalism is given the same standard in both relative and absolute terms), which The Four Deuces correctly summarized the link with capitalism in the quotes below. Rummel thought that colonialism is socialism, I would not be surprised if he thought fascism was far left or socialist, either — do other users understand that those are, in fact, what could be called fringe? The Soviet Union is not to be considered even pre-1941 on the Axis side, Trump did not win in 2020, and the U.S. Capitol attack was not a false flag from the radical left. Holocaust trivialization and double genocide theory are, in fact, very real and the latter is fringe.

Defenders of this article have shown such a low standard for which sources are fine, and is why we have a SYNTH problem. Cherry picking a few sources is not good research, and is not following scholarly literature, but perhaps that is the problem — there is no scholarly literature for what they want (OR/SYNTH is excluded) but there is plenty for what we propose. When we have users who want to put an unjustified overemphasis on primary sources that would fail due weight, it is a problem. When they fail to understand that Wikipedia must rely on independent secondary sources, which is why this whole article is a problem because it is "He said, she said" but, apart from very few exceptions, we are citing this to the ones who said it in the first place, rather than secondary sources which summarize their thoughts for us, and is also the main reason why many authors have been misinterpreted and there is OR — this is a serious problem and there can be no rational discussion when we are continually misunderstood, strawmanned, and insulted, for it is an insult to anyone's intelligence not to see there are problems with this article. Of course there are no problems with it, if you are a believer in it and you engage in Holocaust obfuscation through double-genocide lens. Davide King (talk) 17:20, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Interesting and useful quotes from TFD about this; brakets are my outside comments

Interesting comment, Martin. Prairiespark was questioning the accuracy of a statement in the article that the number of colonials killed by capitalism was far lower than the number killed by Communists. However, we should not use Rummel's blog or other writings that have not been published in the academic press. Note too that Rummel describes colonialism as a form of socialism, not capitalism. --TFD

[I knew he had some fringe views about socialism but still...]

The colonialism referred to was carried out by capitalist countries and the colonies were largely established as privately owned business enterprises. --TFD

The Virginia Company, the East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the Falkland Islands Company, the Dutch East India Company, etc., were all private corporations. Even where colonial administration was directly controlled by the colonial powers, as in Hawaii, effective economic control has usually given to private corporations. Collect's view of the Belgian Congo is pure OR - it was the private property run as a privately-owned business. As Collect points out, Leopold's role as Belgian head of state and owner of the Congo were distinct. It later became a colony of Belium and its economy was organized along capitalist lines, with private investment in mining and agriculture. --TFD

[I see no hurry in making such article on the same standard, suddenly our policies and guidelines seem not to apply only when it comes to Communism and Communist-related articles. I wonder why...] If MKuCR is kept as it was, then the same sourcing standard must be applied to other articles, which means capitalist, fascist, Muslim, and other authoritarian regimes may be categorized, even though I would still argue they are OR/SYNTH ... but at least there would no longer be a double standard, and is just going to show how this article has such low standards for sourcing because there are plenty of sources that may be used for all sort of regime types.

Dispute resolution

Read me

In regards to [2], I do not know how exactly that would work. It may sound elitist, and I am personally not one, but I am wary about a RfC or AfD in this specific case because

• so many users have shown a lack of knowledge and understanding of both the topic and Siebert's rational arguments backed by sources and policies
• one needs to have the context for this whole diatribe
• the mere existence of this article for well over a decade by now, despite none of the raised issues (POV FORK, NPOV, OR/SYNTH, WEIGHT) being fixed in the meantime, may wrongly lead some users, without having the adeguate context, to think Siebert and I are fringe, or simply assume that RS actually support the article as currently structured
• this is clearly a controversial topic and article, probably the most controversial one, and it is political, so there are political biases but also geographical ones too (do I need to remind of the Easter Europe ban stuff?), as I have wrote at [3], especially in the notes
  • political because, whatever the reason, many users who took it to this article believe in an equivalency between Communism and Nazism, perhaps even the double genocide theory (this also reflects a geographical bias), and are legitimized by political institutions like the European Union (for the record, I am not anti-EU) through the controversial Prague Declaration and resolutions equating not just Stalinism with Nazism, which is still debated even among scholars, but communism and Nazism.
  • problem is that academic discourse does not support the above, and we have been dismissed by Cloud200 as Soviet and Stalin apologists
    • even though we are simply explaining the academic discourse, which is much more nuanced and actually does not support such equivalence
  • see The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945 (2016), pp. 377–378
    • which is considered to be a revisionist view dating back to Nolte but has since been re-popularized by Courtois (who is controversial), and the double genocide theory being a fringe view but supported by state governments in Eastern Europe, amounting to Holocaust trivialization according to scholars

Nonetheless, I am a pragmatist, and I am not sure that is going to solve anything, but I am open and willing about it. What would the topic of the RfCs be about exactly? I just would prefer a rational analysis of arguments and sources, e.g. is Siebert's analysis correct about the summary of topic and the article's issues? Are they correct about how sources are used and synthesized, even not reflecting what they actually say? Or are sources presented by Cloud200 and others in support of their favoured structure correct and good enough? Sources must be scrupulously scrutinized and analyzed, especially in regards to due and weight, and whether they are subject-matter experts or contradict country experts and scholars of Communism.

Perhaps having a RfC about this? With one on more mediators further verifying our arguments and sources? Too complicated but desperate times needs desperate solution, and I am honestly tired of this diatribe. So even if "it is likely to break down either into one very large RFC or several relatively large RFCs", I am willing to try, and hopefully it will not break down but will reach a conclusion that either side must accept and move on. I do not know if Robert McClenon, or anyone else for that matter, are willing to do this but I feel like this is the only way to end it once and for all, so that we can all work together to reflect the result. Because all attempts by Siebert, including the use of country experts, have been rejected, and my attempts to improve the first few sections and the lead took us to dispute resolution, even though they have since been stable (apart from a few IPs who did not want any dialogue or provided no policy I have actually broken), especially my copy editing to the body, which has never been reverted, and accepted as you can see at [4]. Clearly, I am willing for a mediation and to solve this once and for all, I am just not sure about the best way to do it but rational analysis of sources and topic would be the best way, as that is the heart of the matter.

To summarize

I have some reservations about a RfC for this controversial topic and article per the outlined issues I have raised in  • above, but I accept Robert McClenon's offer to mediate. I also have a few questions on whether they already have in mind what would be the questions for a RfC, and I express my belief that it should be based on an analysis of sources, our policies, and whose's side reading is 'correct' on the topic, and those involved should have a broad context and understanding of both sides, and a summary of the dispute, which users like Siebert can concisely do. Davide King (talk) 06:07, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

It's "controversial" only because so many Wikipedia editors are at least Communist-adjacent. Nobody seriously debates the correlation between Naziism and the Holocaust. Caldodge (talk) 18:15, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

OR - just going through the article

Ok, can someone show me where in the source is the part that supports this text:

“ As there are few or no comparative studies on communist regimes, it has not been possible to achieve an academic consensus on the causes and definition of such killings in more or less broad, general terms. ”

Source is this one [5]. Volunteer Marek 01:50, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

I just read the source, and sure enough it does not contain any language even remotely close to what Davide King wrote in this edit. In fact, the review by Straus is about problems in comparative genocide studies, and only discusses communist regimes in passing. For example: "Some authors such as Valentino employ a concept that includes dozens of twentieth-century cases. Other authors, such as Midlarsky, use a narrower definition, with only three twentieth-century cases. Some authors, such as Weitz, Valentino, Mann, and Levene, incorporate communist cases, which generally involve targeting class groups (not ethnic or racial ones). Other authors exclude communist cases. Some authors such as Mann, Levene, and Valentino include colonial cases; the other authors do not." (p. 496) The suggestion that "few or no comparative studies on communist regimes" exist is nowhere to be found in the source. Davide King's well-meaning incompetence when it comes to reading and understanding English-language sources has been a problem that I've noted before, as many of his edits either fail verification or contain liberal amounts of WP:OR/WP:SYNTH. Realistically, all of Davide King's recent edits are suspect due to lack of competence and this supports the need for a rollback to a more stable version of this article. Thanks for spotting this especially egregious WP:REDFLAG claim, Volunteer Marek.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:08, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

That is bordering to well-meaning criticism to personal attacks. Contrary to what has been stated, I used Straus 2007 not for the quoted part but for the fact that genocide scholars have placed little emphasis on regime-type when engaging in comparative analysis. "few or no comparative studies on communist regimes" could be changed to "few or no comparative studies on communist regimes as a whole", or something like that, since comparative studies have been done for Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes, and Communist regimes have also been compared to non-Communist regimes, rather than among themselves as a whole. It would be better to tag that part as citation needed or clarification needed rather than attack me like that and act as though the source I used for that quoted part is Straus 2007 — indeed, Straus 2007 is placed after Genocide scholars have placed little emphasis on regime-type when engaging in comparative analysis,[4] Davide King (talk) 04:28, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Ok, honestly I didn’t look at who put what in when, I just simply read the text of the article and this one was a red flag. Since it seems we all agree that this part is not in the source, can we remove it without controversy? Volunteer Marek 04:39, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

I'd prefer tagging it first, or reword it, before removing outright but I would avoid editing the article in general as long as the AfD is ongoing. For the same reason, you should revert yourself, as did Fifelfoo here for the same reason. If you are not aware, we did discuss a revert of two full months edits at DRN but there was disagreement — Robert McClenon may be helpful in regards to this issue and what can and/or should be done about it. Davide King (talk) 04:58, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

(EC) Davide King, for the record, you have no source for the statement that "there are few or no comparative studies on communist regimes"? That sentence was pure original research, or so self-evident in your mind that no citation was required?TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 05:00, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Volunteer Marek, removal of the red flag claim would be a good start, but probably not sufficient. "Genocide scholars have placed little emphasis on regime-type when engaging in comparative analysis" is not supported by the source either, and there is much in the source that suggests otherwise: "That said, three overlapping explanatory paradigms are evident in the books: idealism, political development, and state interest. The idealism framework roots genocide in specific extreme ideologies ... " (p. 489); "Recent literature on the Holocaust has found some middle ground between these two positions, recognizing both a strong element of contingency and the importance of top-level ideology." (p. 493) [emphasis added]. In sum: Straus 2007 says that the ideology of the governing regime is the major motivating factor considered by one of the three schools of thought in genocide studies that he is critiquing. Davide King summarized that as "Genocide scholars have placed little emphasis on regime-type when engaging in comparative analysis." Davide King's summary is inaccurate and misleading.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 05:00, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

I think I should have made more clear I meant within the context of Communist regimes (e.g. genocide scholars may find ideology important in causing some genocides in non-Communist regimes — your quote seems to show they have reached a middle position, but that is of in genocides general, not necessarily of Communism, as assumed the wording in question is within the context of Communism, rather than generalize. I suggest you to discuss this with Paul Siebert (e.g. example of sourcing analysis performed by Siebert saying Valentino does not see regime type or ideology as important, and focus more on the leaders), as they can better answer your questions and fix the text and/or errors I may have made. I probably should not have generalize, I was mainly think of Valentino, who is a core source of this article — I will let Siebert explain you this better. Davide King (talk) 05:27, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Right, and Straus 2007 puts Valentino in the third school of thought mentioned above: "The third paradigm—what I label the 'state interest' framework—sees genocide as the product of leader-level planning, with Valentino and Midlarsky as the exemplars. ... For Valentino, the calculus appears to be a thought-through, rational response to particular conditions." (p. 491). However, strong competing views exist, and Straus states that all three approaches are flawed in terms of their predictive power and falsifiability.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 05:57, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

TheTimesAreAChanging, I was trying to summary this — e.g. lack of consensus/disagreements among genocide scholars, and "all three approaches are flawed in terms of their predictive power and falsifiability." Is this correct then? If so, do you think something along those lines may be (re-)added? Thank you.-Davide King (talk) 14:01, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Same thing here — do you think you could reword it/better phrase it? Like that comparative analysis has been done mainly between Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (Jones discuss together only Stalin and Mao, and gives Pol Pot a separated chapter) rather than a broad comparative analysis between all or most Communist regimes, and the fact such regimes have also been compared with non-Communist regimes (e.g. Cambodia, the Holocaust, Rwanda), not necessarily between only Communist regimes? Also while the two sentences should be separated (e.g. Jones and Valentino are not mentioned in Karlsson 2008), on the basis that Stalin influenced Mao, who influenced Pol Pot; in such cases, killings were carried out as part of a policy of an unbalanced modernization process of rapid industrialization is from Karlsson 2008, p. 8. Full quote:

Where and how did the historical process begin that was to lead to communist regimes committing crimes against humanity? Did it begin with Marx and Marxism, or when Marxism took root in Russian ground and was remoulded to conform to Russian political culture, or when Lenin and the Bolsheviks carried out their coup d’etat in Petrograd on 7 November 1917, or when Stalin began the major, radical Soviet revolution in the early 1920s? If these crimes are an integral part of the modern project, for which there is much evidence in modern research, what marked the beginning of the unbalanced Russian modernisation process that was to have such terrible consequences?

How could this be (re-)worded? Thank you. Davide King (talk) 14:13, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

While we are on the subject, Davide King, can you please provide a direct quotation supporting your statement that "Critics of communism define a 'generic communism' category as any political party movement lead by intellectuals," since I don't have access to your source? It would certainly help with verification!TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 05:17, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

While I will try to check the source, I think it should be qualified as such as Martin Malia and Stéphane Courtois. Davide King (talk) 05:30, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

The extended quote (to give you an impression of the context) is as follows:

"Malia flirts in the formulations cited above with the suggestion à la Courtois that communism was the greatest evildoer of them all. To his credit, however, in the bulk of the piece he is concerned with laying out a more rigorous set of desiderata that need to be addressed in any comparison between Nazism and communism. The implicit purpose of doing so is to address criticisms that have arisen over The Black Book, and chief among these was the objection that there existed vastly different kinds of communisms around the globe that cannot be treated as a single phenomenon. Malia thus counters by coining the category of “generic Communism,” defined everywhere down to the common denominator of party movements founded by intellectuals. (Pol Pot’s study of Marxism in Paris thus comes across as historically more important than the gulf between radical Soviet industrialism and the Khmer Rouge’s murderous anti-urbanism.) For an argument so concerned with justifying The Black Book, however, Malia’s latest essay is notable for the significant objections he passes by. Notably, he does not mention the literature addressing the statistical-demographic, methodological, or moral dilemmas of coming to an overall communist victim count, especially in terms of the key issue of how to include victims of disease and hunger. Paul Siebert (talk) 07:01, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

@TheTimesAreAChanging: yes, you are right: these authors mentions Communism just in passing. Incidentally, the very same authors are used in the MKuCR article, which create an impression that Communist mass killings are the focus of their study. Do you have any fresh idea on how can we fix that blatant OR? Paul Siebert (talk) 07:17, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

This hardly supports the sentence as written. For starters it takes on author and turn them into a generic “critics of communism”, falsely implying that this is some definition shared by all “critics of communism”. For starters… Volunteer Marek 07:40, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for providing the relevant excerpt, Paul Siebert. I have taken a stab at modifying the text to avoid the implication that the definition provided by David-Fox 2004 is universal to critics of communism, as opposed to a scathing rebuke of Martin Malia's analysis.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 07:53, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

@TheTimesAreAChanging: if you believe that David'Fox's opinion needs specific attribution (which is not completely the case, for his article is not op-ed), why the rest of text is full with "several authors" or "scholars"? Actually, all those statements were made just by handful of authors, so you should either self-revert or bring the rest of the text into accordance with your edits. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:36, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

To the contrary, Paul, the rest of the section is also attributed to specific authors (e.g., "According to historian Anton Weiss-Wendt"; "According to Professor of Economics Attiat Ott"; "Sociologist Michael Mann has proposed"; "As summarized by the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence"; "Professor of History Klas-Göran Karlsson uses"; "Mann and historian Jacques Sémelin believe"; "Political scientist Rudolph Rummel defined"; "Under the Genocide Convention"; "coined by the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte"; "has been used by Professor of Comparative Economic Systems Steven Rosefielde"; "According to historian Jörg Hackmann"; "Historian Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine writes"; "Political scientist Michael Shafir writes"; "George Voicu states that fellow historian Leon Volovici has"; "Professor of Psychology Ervin Staub defined"; "Professors Joan Esteban (Economic Analysis), Massimo Morelli (Political Science and Economics), and Dominic Rohner (Political and Institutional Economics) have defined"; "has been defined by political scientist Benjamin Valentino"; "Political scientist Jay Ulfelder has used"; "Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies Alex J. Bellamy states"; "Professor of International Relations Atsushi Tago and Professor of Political Science Frank Wayman use"; "According to Professor of Economics Attiat F. Ott and his postdoctoral associate Sang Hoo Bae"; "Associate Professor of Sociology Yang Su uses"; "genocide scholar Barbara Harff studies"; "Political scientist Manus I. Midlarsky uses"; "Soviet specialist Stephen Wheatcroft states"). The exceptions (e.g., "Critics of communism define a "generic communism" category as any political party movement lead by intellectuals"; "as there are few or no comparative studies on communist regimes"; "Genocide scholars have placed little emphasis on regime-type when engaging in comparative analysis"; etc.) were added by your ally Davide King ([6], [7], and elsewhere).TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:10, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Really?

"Different general terms are used to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants." Don't see how that general statement is related to the topic of this article. One of the sources is Wheatcroft, who focuses on Russian history only. He never proposed anything of that kind.

"According to historian Anton Weiss-Wendt, the field of comparative genocide studies, which rarely appears in mainstream disciplinary journalsm, despite growth of research and interest, due to its humanities roots and reliance on methodological approaches that did not convince mainstream political science, has very "little consensus on defining principles such as definition of genocide, typology, application of a comparative method, and timeframe." According to Professor of Economics Attiat Ott, mass killing has emerged as a "more straightforward" term." - That relates to Mass killing, as you perfectly know, that article barely mentions Communism.

"Several authors have attempted to propose a common terminology to describe the killings of unarmed civilians by communist governments, individually or as a whole, some of them believing that government policies, interests, neglect, and mismanagement contributed, directly or indirectly, to such killings, and evaluate different causes of death, which are defined with various terms." Who those "several authors" are? Are they really numerous?

"According to this view, which has been either ignored or criticized by other genocide scholars and scholars of communism, it is possible to have an estimated communist death toll based on a "generic communism" grouping." I saw not much critics by genocide scholars. This view is just ignored. that text gives a totally undeserved weight to it.

"For example, Michael David-Fox states that Martin Malia is able to link disparate regimes, from radical Soviet industrialists to the anti-urbanists of the Khmer Rouge, under the guise of a "generic communism" category "defined everywhere down to the common denominator of party movements founded by intellectuals."" Do you have other examples?

All of that is just an attempt to give an undue weight to a couple of sources. In reality, Malia made a claim, he was criticized by David-Fox (and some other authors), and THAT'S IT. The rest is a total bullshit: I saw no example of any real debates among "genocide scholars" about a proper terminology: everybody uses the terms they like, and nobody cares. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:31, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

With the exception of the first sentence, which is a summary expounded on later in the article, most of the text above was added by your ally Davide King. Presumably that means you agree with Volunteer Marek that "the process here has been 'Step 1, make the article horrible by stuffing it full of bad writing and irrelevancies. Step 2, go running to AfD saying "look at how bad the article is!"'" and support the idea of a rollback?TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 20:22, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Not exactly. My point is that any person who edit this section is doomed to balance between Scylla of OR and Charybdis of POV-violation. The section discusses some minor issues that are beyond the scope of majority scholars. DK tried to avoid Charybdis, and accidentally moved closer to Scylla. Yes, he is not an Odyssey, but who can throw a stone to him? Paul Siebert (talk) 20:39, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

This one is fantastic. I'm adding it to my long collection of quotes from Siebert and Kinge who run around teaching others about WP:NPOV while at the same time justifying ones between them. Cloud200 (talk) 09:29, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Not exactly. I am saying that DK's edits are far from perfect, but he has a dilemma: to keep the terribly POV text or to try to partially fix it by introducing some OR. I think he recognizes the problems with his edits, and he will not object to its improvement. If I were you, I would propose some concrete ways to fix all of that (my own proposal is to delete the section completely). Paul Siebert (talk) 19:33, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Maybe, this paragraph?

"The arguments in the second-generation books have some obvious differences. Weitz turns on race and Utopia; Semelin on identity and purity; Valentino on leaders' strategic goals; Midlarsky on imprudent realpolitik and loss; Mann on democracy and ethnic nationalism; and on the rise of the West and nation-states. Valentino importance of perpetrator publics; Mann, Levene, and Semeline explicitly argue otherwise. Midlarsky and Levene reject a utilitarian to genocide; Weitz implies the same (with the emphasis contrast, Valentino argues that genocide is the instrumental leaders who want to achieve a certain goal. Mann and the longue duree of modern state formation and nationalism; sky and Valentino focus more on short-term conditions. significant conceptual differences (discussed in greater Some authors use a narrow definition of genocide; one. Some include communist and/or colonial cases; These conceptual differences and the concomitant lection limit comparability of different findings."

Clearly, the author says that Communism/communist regimes is not considered as an important parameter in comparative studies made by the second generation genocide scholars. That is the fact that is very hard to fit into the article with that structure. And that is an additional reason for at least its major rewrite if not deletion.

@Volunteer Marek: if you honestly want to go through the article, I suggest you to start with old text: it is much more problematic from the point of view of WP:V. Paul Siebert (talk) 07:13, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Clearly, the author says that Communism/communist regimes is not considered as an important parameter in comparative studies I don’t think that’s “clearly” at all! In fact there’s nothing in there to draw the WP:SYNTH that is being presented. Volunteer Marek 07:42, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

I would also like to see where in the source this claim: which has been either ignored or criticized by other genocide scholars and scholars of communism is supported? Volunteer Marek 07:48, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Marek, frankly speaking, I think the whole paragraph is unsatisfactory. The problem is, however, that the article contains even worse SYNTH/POV, which this para is trying partially alleviate: It create an absolutely false impression that the issues discussed in this section is a part of a mainstream scholarly discourse, which is absolutely false. In a situation when the views expressed in that article are simply ignored by most historians, it is hard to expect a widespread criticism. Do you have any idea how to fix that problem without engaging in original research? Paul Siebert (talk) 14:01, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

I was just going through the article sequentially and this is the part I came to that had lots of red flags and just the wording suggested there was some non-sourced OR going on. Other parts of the article may very well also have problems but I haven’t gotten to these yet. Can we then remove this paragraph? Volunteer Marek 18:10, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Paul, Straus 2007 states that some comparative studies of genocide specifically exclude communist killings of political or class enemies, citing the UN definition, so it is not surprising that it mentions communism only in passing. However, Straus 2007 does not support the inference that mass killings under communist regimes did not occur in the twentieth-century or are not a notable topic. The specific use of this source by Davide King was WP:SYNTH and failed verification; while Straus is somewhat critical of the scholars in question (who include some of our key sources, especially Valentino), and of the field of comparative genocide studies in general, there is no indication that Straus's view is the more mainstream view in academia. To the contrary, Straus seems to make clear that academic discourse regarding the common causes of genocide has not yet achieved consensus.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:10, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

"Genocide scholars" do not care too much about terminology, so they frequently use the term "genocide" in its broader meaning, i.e. it implicitly covers all other "-cides". In that sense, "genocide prevention" does not mean prevention genocides sensu stricto. You know that it was me who brought this source here, and I perfectly know what Straus says.

To prevent possible disruption of the discussion, let's agree that noone questions that mass killings never occurred in Communist states, or that Communist authority bear no responsibility for them. The points of disagreement are different: (i) what exactly fall into the category of "mass killings" (the answer strongly depends on one's political views), and (ii) if those mass killings have some significant common causes, and this cause was Communism. If you agree that that is the core issue, then let's continue our dialogue. If you can propose some better summary, please, do that. Otherwise, I have no desire to waste our time. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:48, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

What you are trying to do here, is to push your WP:POV that there exists any single majority view on these two issues you correctly identified. By endlessly disputing this, you have effectively blocked any attempts to improve the article since at least August, and certainly wasted weeks of people's time.

As it was highlighted plenty of times, if there is a debate on a particular topic subject to interpretation, the point of WP:NPOV is not to "average" it by selecting any "majority" view, but to objectively present the debate itself, which the article does to some extent. What you have been pushing in the article since September however was to frame the debate through the lens of an actual fringe "double genocide theory", which is an extreme WP:POV.

You have been doing that by letting King push more blatant edits, which are or are not contested, but if they are, then King steps back and you step in to defend them by watering down the criticism with Gish gallop and gaslighting. This was exactly the case with mentions of "double genocide theory being mainstream in Eastern Europe", which were added by King, defended by you and King for over a month, and "magically" disappeared after I explicitly tagged each of them as unsourced and weasel - which they were from the very beginning. And yes, what I'm doing here is accusing you of WP:DE and I'm determine to take this further as I can clearly see you have now replicated the same tactics in the DRN and AfD. Cloud200 (talk) 09:46, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

@Cloud200: That becomes annoying. Accusations about personal behavior that lack evidence is a personal attack. I respectfully request you to provide evidences, or I report you at AE. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:35, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Another solution is as follows: you withdraw all your insulting posts and switch to a more productive mode, which, among other things implies a respectful dialogue devoid of inflammatory language and logical answer to my arguments. Deal? Paul Siebert (talk) 19:38, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Marek, frankly speaking, the only solution is to remove the "Terminology" section. It is awful, and it contains a lot of POV/SYNTH. What is a purpose to have it if majority country-experts just ignore all that bullshit? Paul Siebert (talk) 20:52, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

If you really want to save this article, let's talk what we can do. I have some plan, which will allow us to write a totally neutral, well sources and notable story. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:55, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

misplaced comment sections

There are some comments in new sections above that seem to be misplaced !votes in the current AfD. Is moving them there appropriate? ~ cygnis insignis 16:58, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

None of the comments were policy-based, so they would be inappropriate at AFD. I've removed them per WP:NOTFORUM/WP:REFACTOR. Additionally, I've protected the page temporarily from further disruption from unregistered editors. This page is not for airing grievances regarding communism. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mass killings under communist regimes (4th nomination) is still open for editing, though everyone seems to be leaving comments on its talk page for some reason. clpo13_(talk) 17:08, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

They almost certainly due to a thread on conspiracy-clickbait website 4Chan, which entirely misrepresented what the AfD discussion is about. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:11, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

This thread has clearly grown out of 4chan and into mainstream politics on platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. Nothing good will come out of it, and some conspiracy centered political leaders seems to have taken the fight. The current political situation isn't helping. Larrayal (talk) 23:45, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

As I say, misplaced, but I was considering how to incorporate those comments into the AfD [in an increasingly desperate attempt at providing balance in my nom] There are keep !votes that are founded on similar points of view, although I would be hesitant to link the diff of reverted edits as an example. ~ cygnis insignis 17:23, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Most of the same arguments are being made at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Mass killings under communist regimes (4th nomination), if you're looking to reference them. Taking some of those concerns into account might be worthwhile, particularly the complaint that Wikipedia is whitewashing communism entirely by deleting this one article. clpo13_(talk) 17:27, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Also, as pointed out at the AFD, the deletion discussion has been mentioned at https://notthebee.com/article/wikipedia-is-considering-the-deletion-of-the-page-titled-mass-killings-under-communist-regimes-. For context: The Babylon Bee#Not the Bee. clpo13_(talk) 17:30, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

It was a reasonable action per NOTFORUM, I'm also comfortable with the last two sections being deleted as well if the line was drawn at established v. identifiable ip swarm. ~ cygnis insignis 17:33, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

@Clpo13: Incidentally, I was one out of few persons who bothered to go to a library and take a paper version of Rummel's database. That is awful: Rummel seriously cites Cold war era rough estimates of Soviet deaths, and his GULAG figures are totally inconsistent (more than 10 times greater) with all consensus figures. Rosefielde re-considered his estimates (significantly downward), Conquest did that too - everybody. Rummel is arguably the only person who refused to take a look at new data that became available after fall of the USSR. And those figures are seriously cited by that web site? Surely, that is an additional strong reason to delete the article. Rummel already has one page, and that is more than enough.

The very article's structure does not allow us to get rid of that trash, because serious scholars are not interested in compiling Guinness book type figures of a "global Communist death toll. As a result, we have a paradoxical situation: we have modern and trustworthy figures of human life loss for almost each event, but, instead of that, we put forward a lousy "Communist death toll" data from an outdated databases or from self-described anthropologist. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:02, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

If Rummel's "Death by government" is trash, why is it cited 1573 times? Rummel's numbers seem good enough for this genocide site, or is that trash too? --Nug (talk) 11:37, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

'If Mein Kampf is cited 390,000 times [8], why doesn't Wikipedia use it as a source for articles? Proof by Google search results is a poor argument for anything... AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:44, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Lol, never thought Godwin's law would be invoked. It was Paul's suggestion to select sources based upon Google scholar citation counts. --Nug (talk) 12:21, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Regardless of who's suggestion it is, trying to use Google search results as a means to assess the usefulness of sources is poor practice. And WP:OR, to use Wikipedia jargon. And methodologically flawed, for several obvious reasons. Though if it is being used in this discussion, I can't say I'm surprised, given the disregard for normal Wikipedia practice (and basic academic practice for that matter) evident from this talk page. If Rummel is being cited, what is he being cited for? And what do those who cite him have to say about it? That is what matters when assessing a source. That, and whether other independent sources come to similar conclusions. Because otherwise, this article isn't discussing 'Mass killings', it is discussing what Rummel had to say about them. And we appear to already have an article on that. AndyTheGrump (talk) 12:37, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

That is correct. Rummel is being cited mainly for his works where he applied Factor analysis to social sciences, and for his democratic peace theory. That makes him prominent. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:43, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

No, it is not a poor argument. Can you please tell me how many sources that cite Mein Kampf support it? Obviously, all of them cite it mostly for criticism.

Of course, the number of citations per se is not a sign of reliability, it is a sign of notability. However, usually, books or articles are sited not for criticism or debunking, but as a source of information. If the citing articles contain no serious criticism (and usually that is the case) then the numer of citation is a good measure of reliability.

I am a little bit disappointed that I need to explain you so trivial and obvious things. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:42, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

I agree that Mein Kampf was probably not a good comparison, for a better one, The Bell Curve has been cited over 12,000 times, but I doubt the majority of the citers agree with the conclusions of the book. but it is no doubt well known and has received much commentary. Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:49, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

then it is by no means notable, but controversial. However, the situation described by you is hardly typical. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:04, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't exactly describe Rummel or the Black Book as typical either. Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:13, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Obvious bias.

Wikipedia is protecting this section to allow obvious abuse and manipulation by a handful of partisans pushing to rewrite history to cover atrocities by citing other partisan academics. The effort to derail this into the realm of opinion, while calling those opinions fact, is as blatant as it is absurd. If this is allowed to continue, this entire project has failed, and Wikipedia should just close up shop. 2600:1700:1260:11E0:A5CF:E379:8577:8704 (talk) 18:51, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Why isn’t there an article on mass killings under fascist regimes? 2001:569:BE89:B000:619A:78A7:10A9:88B3 (talk) 19:00, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

I agree that there should be an article about mass killings under fascist regimes as well. X-Editor (talk) 20:07, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

I agree as well. Th78blue (They/Them/Their • talk) 23:36, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Go for it. --Nug (talk) 23:55, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Please don't. We really don't need more of these articles. Every item you could fit there already has it's own article, a brief search for sources on the topics of general fascist mass killings only reveals sources that talk about genocide/mass killings at large, or specific incidents such as the Holocaust or Indonesian genocide. BSMRD (talk) 00:04, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Exactly. Valentino's work Final Solutions is about genocides and mass killings in the 20th century. We may want to describe all relevant events in such an article, rather than make controversial and/or inadeguate grouping by ideology or regime type. Davide King (talk) 00:11, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Don't be in denial. Valentino does in fact categorise mass killings as "communist" with a chapter called "Communist mass killings". The first sentence in that chapter:

"Communist regimes have been responsible for this century’s most deadly episodes of mass killing. Estimates of the total number of people killed by communist regimes range as high as 110 million.".

--Nug (talk) 01:12, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Did you read other chapters? How do you summarise the main concept of the Valentino's book? And hot his ostensible categorisation of "Communist mass killings" fits in hos major theoretical concept? Paul Siebert (talk) 01:49, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Do not be rude. That is a subcategory of "dispossessive mass killing", which also includes "ethnic mass killings" and "mass killing as leaders acquire and repopulate land." Neither of this explains why 'Communist mass killings' cannot be described within the context of genocides and mass killings in general article, which is exactly what scholars like Valentino did — their work was not focused on Communism but on genocide and mass killings, which is going to include also Communism and Communist regimes anyway, though mostly Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's.

You also ignore that Valentino says only Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (e.g. the most radical Communist regimes) certainly fit the Communist mass killings category, while other events may also fit it but cannot verify them, and that most Communist regimes did not, in fact, engage in mass killings, and that his purpose was to explain why — all of this is missing, and can be described much better within the context of genocide and mass killings in general, especially during the 20th century, which is what most scholars do, e.g. comparison between Communist and non-Communist regimes, such as Cambodia, Holocaust, Rwanda. If you want a specific article focused on Communism, we may have a Communist death toll article, or have a separated article about links between Communism and mass killing, while merging events into a general article summary of genocides and mass killings in the 20th century, exactly as Valentino did. Can you explain what would be wrong with this, and why we should not adopt Valentino's work structure?

Davide King (talk) 01:59, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

(Mobile IP) Ya may wanna hold off on that idea & wait, until the AfD is closed on this article. GoodDay (talk) 09:45, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

A whole week is 'enough'. Decide the article's fate & close down the AfD.

It's nearly a whole week since the AfD was opened. Recommend an administrator or somebody who's good at judging AfDs, close it. You've got only two options - Close as 'keep' or close as 'delete'. If anybody complains about which option is chosen? Let'em complain to me, since I'm recommending closure. GoodDay (talk) 09:36, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

There is also the option of no consensus. X-Editor (talk) 02:03, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Black Book of Communism

Evidently not a reliable academic source judging by how 3 of its main contributors rejected the conclusions synthesised by the editor, and two of them alleging that death tolls had been purposely inflated. If the AfD fails then content that relies on its conclusions and sources that draw on its conclusions should be removed per WP:QUESTIONABLE. Dark-World25 (talk) 12:10, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Black Book of Communism describes the work, and its criticism, which articles display a link to the work includes those featuring Template:Anti-communism in Europe since 1989. ~ cygnis insignis 12:24, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

I have no problem with that, but it should not be used as a source for academic consensus. A significant portion of the conclusions drawn in the article derives from the Black Book and its derivative sources. Dark-World25 (talk) 12:31, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

The criticisms revolved around the comparison of communism and nazism, which the article MKuCR doesn’t do. The other criticism is that Courtois inflated the numbers killed as 100 million, okay, say he did and the real number is actually 50 million, does that really make a difference? — Nug (talk) 12:38, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

These are (weak) moral, political and ideological arguments on your part. They have nothing whatever to do with the extremely shaky factual basis for, or encyclopaedic nature of, this article. But they do reveal that your investment in its retention is, like the reason for the existence of the article itself, deeply and inherently political. DublinDilettante (talk) 20:37, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

PS, you should take it to WP:RSN rather than just tagging the article, that just seems lazy to me. —Nug (talk) 12:42, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

The template "{unreliable sources}" loses all meaning when an article is so tagged because someone does not like Courtois. Dark-World25 ought to revert.XavierItzm (talk) 15:51, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, RSN is the appropriate place for this discussion. Would be good to get a formal consensus on the Black Book at least. Perhaps it may be best to wait a few days after the close of the AfD before asking for community input on anything related to this article, just to let the heat die down a little bit. BSMRD (talk) 16:13, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

All of that is superficial. "Reliable" for what? The Werth's chapter is definitely contains many reliable facts and conclusions. The problem is that the source is used mostly to advocate the most controversial and politicized statement it makes: that "a total number of victims" is a legitimate scholarly topic, that all victims should be ascribed to Communism, and that Communism (a "generic Communism") was the worst murdered of XX century, which implies it was worse than Nazism. All of that is heavily criticized, and, if that article will be kept, it should be moved to the bottom to a separate section that discusses various controversies. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:21, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

A book published by Harvard University Press is not what the "unreliable sources" tag was created for.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 17:40, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes. It is reliable. But it is reliable primarily due to Werth&Margolin, but Wikipedia uses it to advocate the views of Courtois, whom Werth&Margolin openly disagree with. Werth traces the roots of Stalinist violence in Lenin, who according to him, was a successor of Nechaev, and he emphasises specific features of pre-revolutionary Russian society. Courtois sees the roots in Marx, and he stresses commonalities. Werth is praised by majority of authors, whereas Courtois is criticised. And guess, whom Wikipedia picks? That is not an ureliability issue, that is a misuse of a pretty reliable source, which is more a conduct issue than a content dispute. Paul Siebert (talk) 18:41, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

It is not my intention to be offensive, but one possible reason is that Werth's chapter is long, it contains no simple thoughts and general facts that can be picked up and pasted to the article, and it requires some efforts to understand and summarise it. By the way, did anybody here read it in full? Paul Siebert (talk) 18:45, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

The article does not use the BBoC to advocate anything, it just mentions Courtois' estimate of the death toll along with ten other estimates, along with his opinion about the linkage with communism along with the other author's opinions as to the causes, all attributed to him. Any challenge to his attributed viewpoint is either given immediately inline or as footnote anyway. So a separate section that discusses various controversies is redundant not only for that reason but also because nobody disputes that some specific mass killing did not occur under a specific communist regime, apart from certain famines for which there is a section on famine debates. --Nug (talk) 18:52, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Courtois sets the paradigm: to collect all deaths in one category. That creates a whole section, because is we remove this source, most of the rest is garbage. Courtois's idea to collect all deaths together was severely criticized by Werths and many other authors. That alone makes the existence of this section incompatible with NPOV. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:16, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

No, Courtois didn't set any the paradigm in regard to the article. I'm sure Werth was well aware he was contributing to a book that grouped topics related to killings under communist regimes together, his issue wasn't related that grouping but to the introduction that compared communism and nazism and the claimed inflation of numbers. MKuCR does not do that comparison. As I said, even if we half the 100 million to 50 million, does it really make any difference? --Nug (talk) 21:05, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

The introduction was not peer-reviewed, and the chapter themselves do not support the MKuCR narrative and structure, that was specifically Courtois and Malia's idea. By the way, why not citing scholars for what Courtois said? Why do we must rely on A said, and cite it to A rather than B? Davide King (talk) 19:20, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Before you claimed (or was it Paul?) that MKuCR narrative and structure was based on Valentino, now you are saying it is based on Courtois' introduction, make up your mind. --Nug (talk) 21:07, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

No need to be condescending. The MKuCR is the result of synthesis between core sources, which are misread (e.g. Courtois is about a Communist death toll, and equation between racial genocide/Nazism and class genocide/Communism, while Valentino is about Communist mass killing as a subcategory of dispossessive mass killing, alongside other mass killing categories and subcategories, and wrote about mass killings which happened to happen under some Communist regimes, and noting that most Communist regimes did not, in fact, engage in mass killings and shought to explain why, led him to believe that it was Communist leaders, not communist ideology, the cause and/or offset of such mass killings in such states, while many others — or "most" to use his own words — Communist regimes did not) and merged together to form MKuCR, taking the Communist grouping popularized by Courtois and the mass killing category from Valentino.

They are by no means the only ones — we have Mann, whose main point was that genocides, such as Rwanda, happened due to democratic transformation in the country; this is a problem of many sources, where we cherry pick any mention of Communist regimes, and ignore everything else and the context they are put in, e.g. broad genocides and mass killings in the 20th century (Mann, Valentino). Davide King (talk) 21:36, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Courtois indeed set that paradigm of Communist grouping, and in regards to Werth — considering their own reactions, it appears more plausible that they were not, in fact, aware of it. As noted by Paczkowski, the other sections of the book "are, in effect, narrowly focused monographs, which do not pretend to offer overarching explanations." So in fact even the Communist grouping itself is mainly Courtois' idea from the introduction. Davide King (talk) 21:45, 29 November 2021 (UTC)